Addressing the trauma of health care workers

‘Theater of War Frontline’ addresses real trauma of health care workers

There’s been so much tragedy surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic that the suffering of health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic hasn’t gotten the attention or care that it needs.

That’s why UCSF Health and Stanford School of Medicine invited Theater of War Productions to share its online project “Theater of War Frontline” with health care workers and the public this Thursday.

Presented live via Zoom for free, the event consists of two scenes of abject suffering from ancient Greek tragedies followed by a discussion of how these scenes resonate with the participants’ own experiences and moral dilemmas. Theater of War Productions has used this format over the past 12 years to spark conversations about traumas ranging from combat veterans’ PTSD to racialized police violence. The switch to Zoom during the pandemic was one of necessity, but quickly became a gamechanger to bring even more voices to the table.

“One of the early lessons

of that work was that, even though I had translated the plays and I thought I knew what they were about, the audiences that had lived the experiences described by the plays knew more about what the plays were about than we did,” says Theater of War founder Bryan Doerries, who also directs the plays and facilitates the post-performance discussions.

“The deeper and deeper we

went into communities that had never heard of Sophocles, the more we learned about what these plays were actually saying.”

Performed by four actors, including stage and screen stars Bolinas resident Frances McDormand and Redwood High alum David Strathairn — the two actors starred in the Oscar-winning film “Nomadland” — the scenes are from two Sophocles tragedies that both depict heroes in the throes of agony.

In “Philoctetes,” a warrior abandoned on the way to the Trojan War because of his painful chronic illness must be recruited anew because an oracle prophesied the war will be lost without him. “Women of Trachis” shows Heracles’ wife tricked into lacing her husband’s clothes with searing acid until he begs for death.

“The note I give actors before they go on stage is ‘make them wish they’d never come,’” Doerries says. “We’re not trying to create something that can be consumed like in the commercial or nonprofit theater, but something as complex and as unsettling as life.”

As Doerries puts it, the plays “describe chronically and terminally ill patients as well

SUSAN MERRELL — UCSF Dr. Aenor Sawyer, of Bolinas, first worked with Theater of War Productions on an event on the UCSF campus in 2018.

BARBARA RIES — FOR UCSF “We were forced into some real moral dilemmas that we’ve never experienced in my long career in health care,” says Dr. Aenor Sawyer, left.