Can ancient drama heal modern divides? One rural Ohio college thinks so

Kenyon College’s auditorium resounded with the booming voices of tragic heroes and the sing-song prayer of ancient narrators. The epic conjured up images of panic-stricken people, grieving loss in a city that’s been reduced to ruins.

Students sat alongside professional actors, reading excerpts from “Trojan Women,” an ancient play that tells the story of the aftermath of the Trojan War. It’s a script that is more than two thousand years old, but Kenyon senior and performer Sofiia Shyroka said its themes still resonate.

“My entire family is Ukrainian. My father is actually fighting in the war and he’s on the frontlines right now,” Shyroka said. “And through reading this play, I think the thing that stood out to me the most was like, ‘Oh not much has really changed.’”

That’s why, nearly two decades ago, Kenyon grad Bryan Doerries founded Theater of War Productions, a national performance group that uses Classic theater to explore contemporary conflicts.

On Ohio campuses, conversations around the Israel-Hamas conflict are fraught. Some schools reported a wave of antisemitism and Islamophobia after the Hamas attacks last October. And protests erupted as students called for their universities to divest from Israel in the aftermath. It continues to divide campuses across the country.

Doerries believes that ancient stories can be an antidote to the division.

“[We’re] going back to these ancient texts, often as a way of connecting with the emotions we should be feeling in the present about what’s happening around us,” Doerries said.

The Theater of War

His group has performed thousands of productions at prisons, military bases, hospitals, homeless shelters and college campuses across the country. They’ve tackled topics like addiction, sexual violence and racism.

It’s not the organization’s first trip to Kenyon, either. They visited the rural Ohio college last year to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” a political drama about a small town dealing with the discovery that its water is contaminated. Local county officials participated onstage and in a discussion afterwards about navigating public health crises.

Now, with armed conflicts underway in Ukraine, Israel and Sudan, Doerries said his troupe is turning to Euripides to explore the human cost of war.

“I think it’s actually morally injurious to ignore the suffering of others, to ignore the suffering of innocent civilians or children, no matter what side you stand on,” he said. “So the play is a play that’s written by the Greeks about their enemy, the Trojans. And it’s sympathetic to the enemy’s perspective.”

Democratizing dialogue

The text is rich with emotion and moral complexity, brought to life by acclaimed actors Josh Hamilton and Chad Coleman. The reading ended with Greek soldiers executing the child of the enemy’s general. Academy-award nominee Debra Winger, known for her role in “Terms of Endearment,” beat her chest in agony onstage as Hecuba.

“Oh you heartless heathens value violence over reason. Why did this child die? What made you so afraid of him that you would murder an innocent boy?” Winger cries.

But as the tragedy concluded, the curtain didn’t close. Instead, Doerries opened the floor for audience members to speak. Kenyon students and staff used the ancient text to talk about their personal experience with gun violence, grief, the feeling of complicity in distant wars.

Kenyon sophomore Maya Ferguson related the events onstage to the war casualties in Gaza.

“The girl who died when she was out roller skating. I saw an image earlier of a boy with marbles still in his hands … that inexplicable death of children,” Ferguson said.

Confronting conflict

Conversations about war have been difficult to have on campus. The night of the performance, though, students seemed comfortable as they talked through the play. That’s by design, Doerries said.

“We’re talking about the present conflicts, but we’re talking about it by way of the ancient past [which] creates enough of a buffer where people can hear each other’s perspective,” he said.

Kenyon is just the latest stop on a long list of colleges that Doerries’s troupe will visit, including many campuses that have been hotbeds of protest in the last year.

The Theater of War isn’t meant to give these institutions a path forward or offer a solution for peace. Instead, Doerries ends each performance with a simple assurance.

“You are not alone across time,” Doerries said to the audience.

For students like Ferguson and Shyroka, that’s a comfort – and a calling: to not shy away from tragedy.