MUSIC CREDITS:

“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

"Green Chimneys" from the album The Thelonious Monk Songbook performed by the Roy Haynes Trio. Produced by U-5, 2013.

"If I Should Lose You" from the album, Out of the Afternoon, performed by The Roy Haynes Quartet. Produced by Impulse! Records, 1996.

Excerpt from the Blues Walk composed by Lou Donaldson from his album Blues Walk, used courtesy of Blue Note Records, a division of EMI Capitol. 

Excerpt of Alligator Bogaloo composed by Lou Donaldson from his album Alligator Bogaloo, used courtesy of Blue Note Records, a division of EMI Capitol. 

Excerpt of Quicksilver composed by Horace Silver and performed by the Art Blakey Quintet, from the album, A Night at Birdland, used courtesy of used courtesy of Blue Note Records, a division of EMI Capitol. 

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. Last week we lost two giants of music, drummer and 1995 NEA Jazz Master Roy Haynes who died at the age of 99 and 2013 NEA Jazz Master saxophonist Lou Donaldson. We’re saddened by their losses but are fortunate enough to have interviews with them both which we’re excerpting here in tribute to their extraordinary musicianship. Let’s start with Roy Haynes….and Green Chimneys composed by Thelonious Monk and performed by the Roy Haynes Trio.

  (music up)

Roy Haynes defined the word style in every sense: from his distinctive drumming to his snappy clothes--he is first among equals. Known for his unique crisp drumming, Haynes may have been the most recorded drummer in jazz.  In a career lasting more than 70 years, he played in a wide range of styles ranging from swing and bebop to jazz fusion and avant-garde jazz. He had been equally successful as a leader and as a sideman-- Thelonious Monk once described Haynes' drumming as "an eight ball right in the side pocket."    Haynes collaborated with the who's who in the jazz world.  As well as Monk, there’s Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Danilo Perez, and Christian McBride to name only a very few.

Haynes had a reputation as a tough interview, he had a surprising amount of patience when he sat down with me at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2014. Here's an excerpt of our talk. 

Jo Reed:You got your start with Luis Russell.

Roy Haynes:  Uh-huh.

Jo Reed:How did that happen?

Roy Haynes: It happened by what I was doing, and the way I was doing what I was doing.  People talked about that, because Luis Russell didn't know anything about Roy Haynes until people told him. And then I was living in Boston at the time, I got a special delivery letter from New York from Luis Russell. He had never heard me, but he heard about me. And I guess it's probably the people that told him about me for him to stretch out and try to reach me, which is the way it happened.

Jo Reed:One of the first gigs you played with him was at the Savoy.

Roy Haynes:  The first gig was at the Savoy.

Jo Reed:It was the very first. What was that like?

Roy Haynes:  What was that like?  It was…

Jo Reed: What was the Savoy like then?

Roy Haynes:  The Savoy, you can't hardly describe it in anything that you'll know about, you've got to have a great imagination because a lot of people would come to the Savoy Ballroom, and they probably wouldn't even dance, there's so much excitement going on. First of all, they had two bandstands. They usually have a big band on one bandstand, and a small band, a combo, on the next bandstand.  Back in probably the late '30s, early '40s they would have the battle of the bands.  So there were two bands, they'd be battling.  I used to hear a lot about it when I was young, in Boston.  Because I think certain nights they would broadcast anyhow, from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to different stations, so I had heard about it then. When I first played there with Luis Russell's band I don't think the bands were really battling then, because it'd be a big band on one side; twelve, thirteen, fourteen-piece and a small combo on the other side, the other part of the bandstand, which was like twin bandstands  together. But that was really an exciting period, because not only the people came to dance, some people would just stand in front of the bandstand and listen. They call that the "home of the happy feet" because people will-- a lot of people could dance like they were professional in those days, '40s, was when I first come to New York with the band. My first job, like I was saying, was at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. So it was a very exciting period.

Jo Reed:And as you said, Luis Russell of course had a big band.  

Roy Haynes:  Yeah, we had, I don't know twelve or thirteen-piece orchestra; three brass, maybe three trumpets, three trombones, three saxophones, three or four saxophones, and a guitar, and bass, and drums, and a great vocalist.

Jo Reed:Who was the vocalist?

Roy Haynes:  Lee Richardson when I was with the band.  He made hit records.  One of his big records was "The Very Thought of You."  He has this voice, "The very thought of you, and I forget to do…," and all the young girls would be screaming. We'd play theaters like the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, and we'd do five shows a day during that period.

Jo Reed: Five shows a day.

Roy Haynes:  Oh, yes.  And if they had a lot of people waiting in lines after each show, they would have to add another show to it.  So you got a chance to make extra money, then. The more shows you did, the more money you made.  And a lot of that wasn't always planned in advance.  Sometimes it would just happen when it would happen, the last minute.  People would be lined up to come in the theater waiting for people to leave so they could come in and catch the show.

Jo Reed:How important do you think that experience was for you as a performer, especially backing a-- playing in a big band?

Roy Haynes:  Well, it was my first big band experience for one thing, which is something I wanted to do anyhow because I used to listen to a lot of the big bands like the Basie band when he had Papa Jo Jones playing drums.  And also when he left they had other younger drummers that I would go and catch with the band.  In fact, I did get a chance to play with that band a couple of times when I was much younger, also. But I was never a steady drummer with the band. I just filled in for a few nights.

Jo Reed: And Papa Jo Jones is one of the drummers that you listened to.

Roy Haynes:  Oh, definitely.  He was the main one. In fact, a lot of drummers my age during that time, in fact drummers of any age, usually were checking out Papa Jo Jones.

Jo Reed:What was it about his sound?

Roy Haynes:  Not only his sound, his feeling, and the way he would do different things.  It's hard to explain, because I'm talking about early '40s. I'm just beginning to be a professional drummer, and I'm listening to certain things that other drummers didn't do, and the way he would do what he did. The feeling came from here, it wasn't nobody to just practice. This was a natural drummer, which is what they told me I was. I was just born a natural drummer, so I could sort of relate to Papa Jo.

Jo Reed:You saw the birth of bebop. Did it grab you right away when you first heard it? Was it like an explosion in your mind when you first heard it?

Roy Haynes:  Well, I don't know if I would look at it as an explosion, but it was something new that was happening. The tunes, like the compositions, and the way the different artists were playing, certain artists, the things that they were doing musically, yeah, it was something new, so it did grab me, yeah. I jumped right on it, yeah.

Jo Reed: And you played with Charlie Parker.

Roy Haynes:  Yes, Charlie Parker hired me, I forget what year it was, 1949 I'm thinking, yeah.  And I was with Lester Young during that period. And I know once there was a gig, a concert, in I think Baltimore, Maryland where there were two bands; Charlie Parker's band-- I was with Lester Young then.  And Charlie Parker was there with his band, and his drummer at that time was Max Roach. So Max Roach's drums were set up on the stand, on the bandstand.  And I said, "I'm going to sit my drums right beside his."  Max was very popular then. And I was a young guy-- younger guy, a couple of years younger than him, just beginning to get popular also. So I said, "Yes, I'm going to set my drums right up next to his," and I did, and not even realizing that I would end up playing with Charlie Parker.  I was with Lester Young then.  And that was a great time of my life with the music, and a great experience to be playing with Lester Young opposite Charlie Parker.

Jo Reed:I would think it would be.

Roy Haynes:  Oh, yes.  That was a very exciting period.

Jo Reed: I seem to remember people saying Lester Young spoke in a very particular language.  He was very funny, but you kind of had to understand where he was coming from to get what he was saying, did you find that to be the case?

Roy Haynes:  Yeah, that was very true.  Lester Young, he was one of the most, how can I describe him so people will understand, original people that I have ever met, not only in the way he dressed, the way he talked.  He would talk-- if he just met you, he would talk his language to you.  So some of the things you probably wouldn't understand what he was saying.  But that's the way he was.  He was a very original person all the way; the way he played, the way he dressed, and the way he talked.  And it was not just a put-on thing, that's the way this man was.

Jo Reed: Were you sorry to leave that band and go with Charlie Parker in some ways?

Roy Haynes: I was happy because I wasn't just moving on to move on, I was going to be playing with Charlie Parker, one of the great persons. I went from Charlie Parker to Sarah Vaughan.  it was great playing with Charlie Parker.  He was a great genius.  Sarah Vaughan was a genius also. They did a recording together that also inspired me.  Charlie Parker was on a recording with Sarah Vaughan.  Sarah Vaughan, I mean, she could just-- she knew the music, too.  She knew the chords, the changes that she wanted the musicians, especially the keyboard player, to play for her. We have a lot of people that are great singers, but they don't always know the music or about what they're doing, they just do it naturally only, and they're gifted to do it that way.  But Sarah Vaughan, she could pick up the music and read the music as well, a new composition that she never heard before. One of the differences of just playing with somebody who can sing, and not a great musician, but Sarah Vaughan was a great musician as well.

Jo Reed: You were with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot with a great live recording.  I think it was '50-- 

Roy Haynes:  Late '50s or '60s, Yeah.

Jo Reed: What was it like playing with Monk?

Roy Haynes:  It was great.  I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed every moment.  Little Monk wasn't just an ordinary artist.  He had a lot of feeling, a lot of imagination, and it was great.  It was great playing with him.  Only thing that was kind of strange, sometimes you had to wait hours before he would show up, so we wouldn't play until he arrived.  So sometimes the club would be crowded with people waiting for Monk to come.  But that was a long time ago.  That was in the late '50s.  That was yesterday.

Jo Reed: That was yesterday. Jazz has a reputation, rightly or wrongly, of being not a young person's music anymore. I'm often in audiences, and I always look around to try to see how old people are in the audiences, and they tend to be older audiences.  And opening jazz up to younger people seems to me to be something that is a very significant thing to do, and that is something that you do. Your audiences, the demographics tend to be more skewed.  I'm not saying they're all young by any means, but they do tend to be more skewed.

Roy Haynes:  You're absolutely right.  That's something, huh.

Jo Reed:I think so.

Roy Haynes:  It's something for me to think about, too.  Yeah.  I think about it.  Yeah, I really-- because sometimes I don't notice it right away.  I know I've heard people say years ago, I'm not talking about the last two years, but even before that, "You draw a really young audience."  Fifty years ago would say that about me, when I was much younger than I am.  So I guess that has to do with the music, or the feel of the recordings, or something they heard or read about my music or something.  I don't know.  I'm one of the ones that-- I don't analyze things.  I don't try to.  Some of the-- a lot of the things that happen I just keep on keeping on, and don't try to figure them out. That's what I do on the bandstand, too, a lot of times.  If I try to really figure out the music, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, I try to do it by what I feel rather than talk about it.  Even if I have somebody new in my band, I don't sit down and tell them what I expect them to do, what I would like them to do.  Usually they probably feel something, or heard from some way-- we don't talk about it much.  And it works.  It has been working.  So I'm going to leave it alone…

Jo Reed: That was an excerpt of a 2014 interview with 1995 NEA Jazz Master Roy Haynes who died last week at the age of 99 one of the best drummers who ever played.  We’re taking a quick break, we’ll return with our tribute to the late Jazz Master Lou Donaldson

(Music Up)

Jo Reed: And now our remembrance of 2013 NEA Jazz Master Lou Donaldson who passed away last week at the age of 98

Lou Donaldson's alto sax had been a force in jazz for more than six decades. He spent his early years in the bebop era, influenced heavily by Charlie Parker but Donaldson combined bop with a more soulful sound that was absolutely his own, it was a style of playing that earned him the nickname, Sweet Poppa Lou.

Donaldson made a series of classic records for Blue Note in the 50s, and Donaldson's first records with organist Jimmy Smith led to the groove-filled jazz of the 1960s and 70s.  And Lou was an outstanding stage presence and continued to perform his swinging bebop until he was 92 years old when he announced his retirement. I spoke with his him in late 2012 when he had named an NEA Jazz Master—here are excerpts of that interview. 

Lou Donaldson: First time I heard jazz was on the radio station, WBT from Charlotte, North Carolina, which was a country and western station. That's all they played. But…they had one disc jockey there, a guy named Grady Cole -- never will forget him -- and he had one record, Louie Armstrong and it was St. James Infirmary. And he played that every day because he loved that. And that's my first time hearing jazz music. And I liked it. In fact, I waited for that one record.

Jo Reed: As to what influenced Lou Donaldson’s own sound on the saxophone

LOU DONALDSON: Whenever I play a ballad, I always try to get a tone like Johnny Hodges, like he used to slur notes and sustain certain notes on his saxophone. And, when I tried to move through the chords, I would try to move through them like Charlie Parker.  I heard him playing with Jamie Chan's band, and it was great. I never heard anything like that before. It changed my approach completely. Because I wanted to play like that. And I'd buy the records and wear them down to the aluminum. You know, they had an aluminum base then. And I'd play them so much I'd run, I'd wear out the record. So that's, that's about the style I played.

Jo Reed: Lou Donaldson moved to New York City in 1950—a great place for jazz. Lou became the house saxophonist at the legendary Minton’s Playhouse—one of the birthplaces of Bebop 

LOU DONALDSON: We had about ten clubs right in Harlem where you could go and play you know, music.

Minton's was like a joint. It wasn't really a club. It was what we called a walk-in place. You know, you didn't have to pay anything. And, everybody came there. It was like a celebrity hangout, because you had people say, like Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. They worked downtown. But their jobs ended at twelve o'clock or one o'clock. Minton's stayed open 'til four o'clock. So about two o'clock, all of them were there. You know, they'd come in to hear the music. And everybody would be there. It was great.

Best club to play in. Best club. I knew everybody. Never be another place like that. Not for jazz music.

Jo Reed: Lou Donaldson came on the scene pretty much at the beginning of hard bop And he’s thought and wrote about the transition from swing to bebop.

Lou Donaldson: Right. Most of the jazz before bebop was dance music. Normally, jazz was dance music. All the bands played for dancing. Every band played for dancing, very few bands ever played, like, concerts. Maybe Duke Ellington or someone like that once in a while. But everybody, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford… all the bands. All them played, they played for dancing. That's, that's what they were. Dance bands.  The transition was that Dizzy and Charlie Parker had a new way of playing music, and it was a smaller group. Actually, what happened, they talked Coleman Hawkins into making a record with called Woody and You. It was written for Woody Herman. And that set everybody on that trend and started them playing that way and they played a lot of solos. In the dance bands, you didn't have many solos. You maybe had one or two and that was it. And you never had a drum solo but once a night. You'd usually feature the drummer one time a night and that was it no more. And it was great. It was great. But bebop you could play, everybody could play on every song. It was a different kind of setup.

Jo Reed: Lou Donaldson was one of the people, along with Art Blakey and Clifford Brown, who performed on one of the great live jazz albums, A Night in Birdland.

Lou Donaldson: Yes. It's the best, best-recorded session ever done live, yeah.  It was a Blue Note date. Blue Note, Alfred Lion got everybody together and wanted us to make this date. What happened is he put Art on the drums and Horace, and myself. And I had made this record with Clifford Brown a year before then. And they liked Clifford Brown so well, they brought Clifford Brown in on trumpet. And, and Curley Russell on bass. And that's, that's the way it developed. But once we got to playing, the people were into the music. And Clifford Brown was so dynamic you, wouldn't believe. I would've played job for no money. This cat was great. To be so young and have so much stuff together at that age, it was amazing. He was amazing. And Art actually played well on that himself. So it was amazing, amazing. You got the energy, the projection from the music to the people, and you can hear it on the record. And it was great, it was great. It was a different kind of music. As anybody knows that plays music, sometimes you're just into it better, you play better. Same songs every night, but it's a different thing. Some nights a different thing.

Jo Reed: In 1958, Lou had a huge hit with “Blues Walk”  in fact, it became his signature song. He explains how it came about 

Lou Donaldson: Well, you won't believe it.  I had a meeting with Al Lion and Frank Wolf. And I told them, I said, "Look, I'm not recording any more music with no, with any junkies. The junkies got to go." I wanna pick the musicians, I wanna pick the band, and we're going to make this record."

So I picked this guy, Herman Foster, who played piano. He was blind. He was singing in a church. But I had been playing jam sessions with him up at Carney's, and I liked him. And I picked Dave Bailey, drummer. Dave was a liquor salesman, but I had played some stuff with him and I liked him. And I got Ray Barretto on the congas. And the bass player I had was Peck Morrison who lived with me. I was living in a housing project at that time up in Throggs Neck in the Bronx, and he got in, and he was my neighbor, so he played the bass. And we made this record and it was a hit. I couldn't believe it.

Now Frank Wolf told me, it's the first record that Blue Note got on a jukebox from New York to California. That's a good tune. It's got a good groove, got a good groove to it. Good groove to it.

Jo Reed: One reason Lou Donaldson is such a dynamic performer is that he can read an audience—in fact, he’s known for that ability.

Lou Donaldson: We had what we'd call a "feel 'em out" set. The first set.  Feel 'em out. When we went to a new place that we never played, we played a cross section of music. We played fast, we played slow, we played blues, we played ballads. Whatever the people responded to, that's where we laid. Then we'd sneak in a couple of bebop tunes and anything that we wanted to play. But once we got them in our pocket, that's what we did. It's amazing but music is like that 

Jo Reed: His other great jazz innovation was a series of recordings with Jimmy Smith that popularized the organ-sax trio sound.

Lou Donaldson: That's it. That was it. Jimmy was a genius. Jimmy was a good piano player, too. But Jimmy was a guy that found that organ and found a new way of playing the organ. Like, like you could play a piano. Up until then, all those players, they didn't really play like piano players. You listen to Neil Budner, Wild Bill Davis, and all those kind of people, they play an organ a different way. But Jimmy played it like a piano. It looked like he was Art Tatum playing an organ. And he was great. He was great. And, my sound, we were very compatible. Yeah, we worked together without a doubt. We had two or three straight hit records, you know. Just like that. It was great.

Jo Reed: Lou also had a big hit with Alligator Bugaloo with NEA Jazz Master Dr Lonnie Smith on the organ—even this short excerpt will explain why

Music Up

Jo Reed: And Lou also played with singers including a stint he did with Betty Carter at the Audubon in New York…which came together in an unpredictable way. 

Lou Donaldson: Right. And this is a story I'm telling you, now this is a story that you, you won't believe. I was working in Washington D.C., and I played from 5 to 8. And we had to come back to New York, we got to come through Baltimore which is about 30 miles away. And I knew that Miles was working in Baltimore. So I said, "Let's go by and catch Miles's last set." Saturday night. So I get there about 9 or 10 o'clock, no Miles. I see his band, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe, Red Garland, sitting out on the stoop with their instruments. And I said, "What? What's happening? Why are you sitting out here?" They said, "We're not playing, and the guy won't give us any money." I said, "What happened?" "Miles drew all the money up on Friday night." And they haven't seen Miles since. And naturally, they didn't have any way to get to New York. So I didn't have anything in my station wagon, so I said, "All right, put the bass and drums and things in there, and I'll take you to Philadelphia." Which I did.

And when I got to New York, Red Garland called me, said, "Man, we're quittin' Miles. We see you're working up at the Audubon, say, can we make a couple of weeks up there?" I said, "Yeah, of course you know." But I didn't have anyone but local musicians, so I put up this big sign: "Lou Donaldson with the Red Garland Trio." So many people came they didn't have the space. And so what had happened, I booked the place myself. I rented the place. I had rented it for the summer. And we played from 5 to 9 every Sunday evening. And the business got so good, I said, "We better bring in a singer." So I brought in Betty Carter. That's how she got there. In fact, she wasn't even famous then, because she sang straight-ahead music then. And her big number was "Perdido."  And it was great, it was great. It was a great group. Great time.

Jo Reed:  And what happened?

Lou Donaldson:Everybody made a lot of money and got famous.

Jo Reed: And here are some of Lou’s thoughts about his career.

Jo Reed:  That is the late great 2013 NEA Jazz Master saxophonist Lou Donaldson.  This has been our tribute to Lou and Roy Haynes, who both passed away last week. They are already missed.

You can go to their pages on arts.com to find more about their lives and their work. You’ve been listening to Art Works Produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating! For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Jo: Here’s Roy Haynes 

Roy Haynes: The Savoy, you can't hardly describe it in anything that you'll know about, you've got to have a great imagination. That was really an exciting period, because not only the people came to dance, some people would just stand in front of the bandstand and listen. They call that the "home of the happy feet" because a lot of people could dance like they were professional in those days, '40s, was when I first come to New York with the band. My first job, like I was saying, was at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. So it was a very exciting period. 

Jo: And Lou Donaldson 

Lou Donaldson: Minton's was like a joint. It wasn't really a club. And, it was what we called a walk-in place. You know, you didn't have to pay anything. And, everybody came there. It was like a celebrity hangout, because you had people say, like Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. They worked downtown. But their jobs ended at twelve o'clock or one o'clock. Minton's stayed open 'til four o'clock. So about two o'clock, all of them were there. They used to come in to hear the music. It was great. Great.

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

In honor of Veterans Day, we’re revisiting an episode of Art Works that tells the origin story of Theater of War Productions. Co-founded by classicist, translator, and now its creative director Bryan Doerries, Theater of War began with a simple yet profound concept: presenting staged readings of Sophocles' plays Ajax and Philoctetes to military communities as a means of addressing both the particular challenges veterans face and the lasting impact of war on families and relationships.  Now, with over 20 specialized programs, Theater of War Productions reaches communities worldwide, addressing not only the struggles of veterans but also broader public health and social justice issues, including addiction, racialized violence, and natural disaster. 

This 2012 conversation with Bryan Doerries returns to the beginnings of Theater of War, exploring how he recognized the healing power of Greek classics for veterans navigating challenging circumstances."  Let’s listen

Excerpt of Ajax.  

Bill Camp: Ajax, Ajax! My name is a sad song. Who would’ve thought it would someday become the sound a man makes in despair?

Adam Driver: And now I must care for incurable Ajax. His mind infected by divine madness. Caught up in thoughts he unnerves his friends as we watch his greatest acts of bravery slip through his fingers.

Jo Reed: That is Bill Camp and Adam Driver performing in Sophocles's play, Ajax. It's one of the Greek tragedies presented to active service members and veterans by Theater of War.

Welcome to Art Works, the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how Art Works.
I'm your host Josephine Reed.

It's often too easy to think of ancient Greek tragedy as something to endure during college—vaguely interesting but essentially dead words on a page with little to say to the living. Well, classicist and translator, Bryan Doerries is having none of that. Mindful that Sophocles was a general as well as a playwright, Doerries and other scholars hold that his military plays were written with veterans in mind as a way to help them heal from almost a full century of war. Doerries believed passionately that these ancient military tragedies would both speak to the experiences of today's service members and provide an avenue for them to share their own stories. Doerries is not just a man of vision; he's also a man of action. He went to work and the result is Theater of War.

Bryan Doerries: "Theater of War" is an innovative public health project that presents readings of Sophocles' ancient Greek tragedies about war; in particular a play called Ajax and Philoctetes to service members and veterans as a catalyst for conversations about timeless issues that service members face today, such as PTSD, suicide, and the impact of war on families and communities. The "Theater of War" is not a performance. It's not entertainment to be consumed, it's a catalyst. And its aim is to give permission to audiences, to talk about things that are very hard to talk about; to talk about stigmatized topics, and to come at it from an emotionally raw and honest place. It's really about how do we help people who've experienced the trauma of war return to our communities and heal.

Jo Reed: Where did the idea for Theater of War come from, Bryan?

Bryan Doerries: Well, I wish I could say I came up with the idea. The idea kind of came up with me. I was sort of the right guy at the right place, the right time. I studied classics in college at Kenyon College in Ohio as an undergraduate, and always believed that these ancient plays that I was studying had a larger audience to reach than the ivory tower. And when I graduated I  went on to direct some- some of my own translations of ancient Greek and Roman plays, and was sobered by the reality that there was a very small audience, if any, that was interested in ancient Greek theater. So I set out to build an audience for my plays, for my translations.

Jo Reed: But what made you think service members in particular would be receptive to these plays?

Bryan Doerries: In the 2006/2007 range when the first real wave of reports of service members and veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were beginning to hit the front pages of papers, stories in which many of our veterans were not receiving the medical care they needed, or stories or homicides, or suicides, or domestic violence, the killing sprees, stories of depression, and stories that comes back from any war, when I started to read these in the newspaper I began to hear echoes and see lines in the stories that seemed like they could be ripped from Sophocles' plays. And that's where I started to get the idea. I thought if I can put my translations of ancient Greek plays in front of military audiences, something might be unlocked in the plays, and something might be unlocked by the plays in the audiences.

Jo Reed:  Bryan, you chose to present two plays by Sophocles: Ajax and Philoctetes.  

Bryan Doerries: I did choose them, again, I felt like it's sort of the plays chose me. Until I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven years old  I felt a passion that these plays-- not just those two in particular-- but these ancient plays had something relevant and meaningful to say to contemporary audiences. But it was really Philoctetes that was the key that unlocked not just the performances we're doing for the military, but performances my company are currently doing for many other types of audiences. The play tells the story of a combat veteran much decorated who'd been to Troy to war many times before in previous deployments, and who, during the first wave, this first expedition to Troy, the beginning of the Trojan War, contracts a mysterious illness from a snake bite and is then abandoned by his own unit, his own friends, on an island, a deserted island halfway between Greece and Troy, where he lives for nine years waiting for the Greeks to return and bring him home. The play depicts extremely agonizing and violent scenes of pain and suffering. Not just physical pain, although there's plenty of that in the play as you watch the main character writhe in agony with this mysterious illness that comes in waves and sort of overtakes his body, but also the psychological suffering, the anguish of having been abandoned and betrayed by your own friends and by your own unit members in the military. Well, anyway, I was reading the stories about the Walter Reed scandal, and on every newspaper after that Washington Post story broke I saw pictures of Philoctetes. Men and women on stretches, waiting for treatment, abandoned on islands. And it occurred to me that through modern medicine we'd created the conditions to abandon veterans and individuals suffering from chronic illness like Philoctetes.

Philoctetes: My son, I am Philoctetes, keeper of Heracles' bow. Whom the generals and Odysseus abandoned. Suffering from a snake bite, they left me here, to die in tattered rags, sleeping in a cave, starving without much food to eat. I only wish the same for them.

Bryan Doerries:  It occurred to me that perhaps the play was even more relevant now than it was in its own time. And so I got this passionate idea that I would go out and find a military audience. And I knew no one in the military at the time that I got this idea, and it took about a year-and-a-half to convince anyone in the military that performing Greek tragedy for active-duty service members would be a good idea.

Jo Reed: Take me through that. It's not easy to crack the military if you're an outsider. How were you able to convince somebody there to give the okay. Which branch was it?

Bryan Doerries: The Marine Corp gave us our start and I think uncoincidental. The Marines are a values-driven organization, and some of the core values that they uphold and that they are trained and inculcated to you know, hold within them our ancient values, values that transcend time, like honor, courage, and commitment. And so it's not hard for the plays to translate for these Marine Corp audiences. Basically what happened was I spent about a year knocking on doors, sort of in ignorance, not really knowing how to go about finding a military audience, calling people, or writing letters, sending emails. Most of the doors were politely shut in my face, a few were slammed. Almost a year out  I was beginning to give up hope that I would find an opportunity to do this. This was not my day job at the time, it was an avocation or hobby. And I was reading the New York Times in January of 2008, a series of front-page Sunday articles that were featuring and describing the invisible wounds of war and the onset of violence and suicide that was returning to our shores from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in that article in the New York Times there was a section called “an ancient connection” in which Jonathan Shay, the MacArthur award-winning writer and psychiatrist who wrote "Achilles in Vietnam", made a series of connections which I'd heard many time before by him and others between the ancient Homeric epics and contemporary war fighting. And those are all beautiful arguments, and Jonathan's a friend, and I was delighted to see him in the article. But just below where Jonathan had been quoted there was a quote by a Navy psychiatrist named Captain William P. Nash who was the head of combat operational stress control for the Marine Corp in 2008. And the quote was something like: "I begin all of my presentations on combat stress and PTSD with the ancient story of 'Ajax'."  There it was in bright lights. I knew if I'd track down William P. Nash, Captain Nash, I might find my audience. And so I got on the phone and started dialing, and I looked up email addresses. And within about a day I'd heard back from him and he said in his email, "I don't know about giving you a big military audience, but how about presenting your translations as a plenary session for a conference in San Diego on combat stress or PTSD for four or five hundred Marines. And, of course, that was our first performance later that summer, and it changed everything.

Jo Reed: The performances are very simple productions essentially they are readings. Why this simple structure?

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, it's deceptively simple. Really there are no frills. There’s a table with four or five chairs, four or five actors in their street clothes. The actors are reading from scripts. It's just a reading, so to speak. The reading  takes about fifty to sixty minutes, depending on which program we're presenting, what cut of a scripts. It's important for us to keep people's expectations as low as possible. And in some ways the slot that we're usually placed into in military contacts, the expectations certainly couldn't be lower because most of the time that slot is reserved for deadening PowerPoint presentations about the subjects we try to address. But people come in and they expect, you know, when they hear the word reading to be bored out of their minds. But of course our readings are like readings on steroids. The actors are fully committing emotionally. They're attacking the text. It's loud, it's fast. It defies any, you know, received expectation of what a reading is or could be. And as soon as the actors are finished with their reading there's no fanfare, no curtain call. They immediately leave the stage. And they're replaced by the four members of the community in which we're performing. And those members usually include a service member who's deployed and usually participated in the conflicts in the last ten years in Iraq or Afghanistan, a veteran of the current wars or previous war,  a chaplain or mental health professional, and finally a spouse or family member. And those individuals don't come having read "Ajax."  They're just ordinary people who have lived the experiences of Ajax and Philoctetes.  And so what I asked them to do is respond from their guts in the moment to what they've heard and saw what they've heard and seen in the plays that connect with their own experiences personally and professionally. So for three or four minutes apiece in a very raw and unedited fashion they respond, and it's usually very emotional, and it usually frames the tone of the discussion that follows. And as soon as their done with their opening remarks, then I go out into the audience and I ask the audience a series of questions that we've asked audiences all over the country and the world, and the questions are about the plays, but the questions are really aimed at giving the audience permission, having seen these very emotional performances and heard these really raw and emotional responses by our panelists, to respond in a similar fashion. And so these town hall meetings are, is really the objective of "Theater of War.”

Jo Reed: How did that first audience respond?

Bryan Doerries: The first time we scheduled one of these performances, that performance for 400 Marines in San Diego, we scheduled the town hall discussion to last 45 minutes, and it lasted several hours and had to be cut off near midnight. And at one point I remember looking out into the audience and seeing 40 to 50 people lined up to come up to the microphone. And each person who came up this first time spoke unbelievably well, and almost like perfectly rhetorically structured monologues in which they had always woven in or used a quote from the play as a point of departure for their comment, as if they'd known the plays their entire lives. People felt all empowered to speak the truth of their experience. And it was then that I knew that we had stumbled across something extremely powerful and ancient; perhaps something that in spite of the simplicity of the format you know, with we performed these events, something we've lost touch with in our culture, which is the power of what theater can do.

Jo Reed: Let's go back to the plays for a moment. Sophocles himself was a general, correct?

Bryan Doerries: So what we know is that Sophocles was a general. We think he was elected general twice, and in the ancient world you were in the fifth century Athenian army you were elected to be a general strategos. And he all of the three major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, we presume had some form of military service in their background. Aeschylus, you know, on his grave it didn't say: "Here lies the greatest playwright of the western world."  His gravestone read "Here lies a man who fought in the battle of Marathon." Sophocles was a general. And of course in that time the citizen body of Athens was conscripted into compulsory service. And so it's presumed that as many as 17,000 citizen soldiers comprised the audience that watched these ancient plays. And so then it comes of no coincidence that in a century in which Athens saw nearly 80 years of war, that some of the plays that have survived, the 2,500 years' period since they were written, dealt explicitly with topics that only those who've been to war or those who'd cared for those who've been to war could possibly understand.

Jo Reed: You already talked about the play Philoctetes; would you mind telling  me the story of the other play by Sophocles that you present, Ajax?

Bryan Doerries: Sure. Ajax is the story of a extremely brave and decorated ancient Greek warrior who at the end of nine years of non-stop battle, of nine-year deployment, after losing his best friend Achilles, slips into a depression and into grief. And when betrayed by his commanding officers who end up giving his best friend's armor to Odysseus, another warrior who he feels doesn't deserve them, slips into what can only be described as a dissociative state in which he, filled with rage, attempts to kill his commanding officers and then ultimately kills animals, mistaking them for the men he comes to kill. When he wakes up from that dissociative rage he realizes that he's stained his family and disgraced his unit, and ultimately Ajax takes his own life. The play is about that, but it's also about his family, his wife, his son, his troops, trying as hard as they can to stop Ajax from harming himself when he wakes up and sees what he's actually done.

Jo Reed: I would imagine that Ajax opens up a tremendous amount of dialogue about the impact of PTSD on the families of service members returning from war.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, the remarkable thing about Sophocles, I see Sophocles as much as a playwright and a producer as a  health professional. He brought 17,000 citizen soldiers together and seated them at an outdoor amphitheater in the center of the city of Athens during a century in which Athens saw nearly 80 years of war. And then he told them the story, the Homeric story, a version of the story, of Ajax, in which he takes us into the mind of a soldier who's contemplating suicide. And one of the most remarkable scenes in this play is a scene in which everyone leaves the stage, which is never done in Greek tragedy. The chorus leaves, and the actor playing Ajax is left alone onstage brandishing a weapon, praying to his gods as he contemplates killing himself. And ultimately he kills himself onstage, which is almost never done in ancient Greek tragedy. So Sophocles goes so far as to stage the violence of the suicide. So all these things to me support this notion that he was trying to bring attention to an issue that his community was facing.

Tecmessa: In the dead of night, when the lamps no longer burned, Ajax found his sword and moved to the door. Naturally, I objected. “Where are you going? No messengers come calling for help, all of the soldiers are asleep, please come back to bed.” He turned to me and firmly said, “Woman. Silence becomes a woman.” I've heard that before, and I know what it means, so I quit asking questions. And he left without saying a word. Whatever happened then, I cannot say.

When service members and veterans and families see this play they immediately know what it's about. The first time we did it the first person to speak at that performance was a woman. And she stood up and she said, "Hello. I'm the proud mother of a Marine and the wife of a Navy Seal. And my husband went away four times to war just like Ajax. And each time he came back dragging invisible bodies into our house. And “our home is a slaughterhouse,” to quote from the play. The war came home with him. And when someone does something like that, when a spouse gets up and speaks the truth of her experience, bears witness, it creates a space where other spouses feel comfortable doing the same.

Jo Reed: Bryan, why do you think theater in particular and art in general can serve as a catalyst for people? What do you think it enables in us?

Bryan Doerries: Well, with theater there's something direct and visceral, and I think it affects us on a just a base neurological level. In our audiences I often see people who have been made to come. You know, they say in the military when you have an audience like that they're “voluntold” to attend. And so you're looking at an audience of say 500 Marines, and they're looking at me in my arty glasses and my trim-cut suit, and I'm talking about Greek tragedy in this, you know, somewhat effete way, and I'm looking at their expressions and I can tell that they're thinking about all the different ways they might disembowel me before I finish my introduction. And then ten minutes into the performance, when Ajax comes out of his tent, or when Athena appears, or when Tecmessa, Ajax's wife, is howling for his man to come help mount this intervention to stop her husband from killing himself, all of a sudden you look out in the audience and there are 500 Marines all sitting forward in their seats, and doing what in the military is called locking on, which means staring without blinking for an hour. And there's something about live theater that is something alchemical, something neurological, something transcendent that erases and dissolves boundaries and hierarchies temporarily, something about theater that is extremely conducive to creating a safe space for people to respond in this human way. The idea behind our work is that after we've all had a shared experience of suffering, no matter who we are or what our background, once we've come together and we've had this experience of these actors performing these ancient plays, for about an hour or maybe an hour and a half afterwards, I don't know, our walls come down. And with theater, and with ancient theater in particular, there's also another great advantage which is to say with these audiences where the stakes are career ending in some instances to get up and say, "I have PTSD," or "I've been depressed," or "I've thought about suicide," or "My spouse has thought about suicide," the stake couldn't be any higher. To create an environment where people feel comfortable doing that, the ancient plays are really handy at that because one can watch Ajax and feel all the emotions of the play, and stand up during the town hall discussion and simply say, "I really related to the scene in which Ajax said, "The great man must live in honor, or die an honorable death."  That- that really spoke to my core values. The idea of death before dishonor is something that, you know, my grandfather told me about. Someone could say that. Someone could also stand up and say and step out from behind the archetype and behind the metaphor and behind the character and say, "You know, I was really moved by that because I am Ajax."  And we hear that kind of response either way 50 times in a given town hall discussion. You can simply talk about the play and everyone in the audience knows that you're speaking from a personal perspective without in any way endangering or revealing something that could be hurtful to you and your family. So that's how our format works. I think in general the arts are healing to veterans and to the communities we've visited because they tap into that reminds us of things that…a good example is we were performing at a military base, an Army base for a warrior transition unit. And these are soldiers that are being transitioned usually out of the Army and medically boarded out, but during that time they are treated at as if they're their own specific unit. And after the performance, this Army soldier came up to me and he said, "I didn't feel comfortable speaking during the discussion. But I wanted to tell you, Bryan, that I think Sophocles wrote these plays to restore humanity to individuals who for whatever series of reasons felt that they had lost it along the way. I think he wrote these plays  to restore our humanity."  And I think art has the potential and the capacity to help restore humanity, because it almost reflexively involuntarily it taps into something that reminds us that we are human.

Jo Reed: Well from that performance in San Diego, you ended up collaborating with the Department of Defense. How did that come about?

Bryan Doerries: Shortly after that initial performance of "Theater of War" in 2008 someone said you should really talk to this general named Brigadier General Loree Sutton, who at the time was the founding director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.  And so we did a performance at a conference for the DOD later that year. And the conference was, you know, high-ranking officials, and many generals, and all the people in the corps deco community that were coming together to address these issues. And that went extremely well, and that resulted in a series of conversations at the sort of highest levels of mental health within the military. And you know, I don't know, maybe a couple of months after that I found myself sitting around a table with 15 or 20 people high-ranking officers from every service. We even had someone from the NEA with us. And we also sat around the table and rolled up our sleeves and said, you know, "What would it mean to take this idea and take it to scale." By the end of the meeting we were talking about, "Well, what would it mean if we did 200 performances at 100 military bases or posts across the country?"  We got a contract, and over a one-year period we did more than 100 performances at military sites throughout the country and the world.

Jo Reed: Well, you've been at this for awhile. How has Theater of War evolved over the years?

Bryan Doerries: Oh, boy. Well, so we have a number of projects now that have grown out of "Theater of War" that address pressing public health issues and social issues through live theater and discussion. And our company is now evolved, and the name of the company is Outside the Wire, and that's in reference to a military term which refers to when service members go out the parameter fence of the forward operating base into places of danger. And in some ways all of the audiences we now perform for, whether they're hospice nurses or in prisons, or service members or addicts going to clinics, these are people who live at the extremities of life and who face danger and death on a daily basis. So the exciting thing is that methodology of "Theater of War," the sort of hard-won lessons of facilitating 200 of these events and directing them, has resulted in our applying that very same set of ideas to other social issues.

 

Jo Reed: And on that, we'll leave it. Bryan, thank you so much.

Bryan Doerries: Oh, you're most welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jo Reed: That was Bryan Doerries the co-founder and creative director of Theater of War Productions. You can find out about their 20 plus projects and initiatives that address health and social issues at theaterofwar.com  we’ll have a link in our show notes

Excerpts from Philoctetes performed by David Straithairn 
Excerpts from Ajax performed by Adam Driver, Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel. Both used courtesy of Theater of War

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Bryan Doerries discusses how bringing Greek tragedies to service members opens up new conversations.