Ancient Greek tragedy resonates in Bayview
Reading on aftermath of rampage prompts tearful conversation about gun violence
Tears were shed, lungs were frayed and heartbreaking realities were shouted at the Bayview Opera House, which effectively transformed into a cathartic town hall meeting on Thursday night, April 27.
After a staged reading of Theater of War’s “Hercules in the Bayview,” a rendition of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy “The Madness of Hercules,” the audience and a panel of community members talked about gun violence in the Bayview neighborhood and San Francisco.
“I want to hold him one more time,” said a trembling Gwen Woods, a panelist and the mother of Mario Woods, the man who was fatally shot during a confrontation with five police officers in 2015. “I want something tangible. I want to feel him. I want to embrace him. I want to smell his breath. And I got that sense of what Hercules meant. I need something tangible some days.”
The ancient story, read by a distinguished cast of four including Frances McDormand (“Fargo”) and Reg E. Cathey (“House of Cards”), appeared to resonate deeply across millennia. The brief half-hour scene, performed with gutwrenching force, chronicled the aftermath and resulting trauma of Hercules’ murderous rampage of his own family with an “invincible weapon” after a brief spell of madness.
The organizing company, Theater of War, operates as a theatrical change agent of sorts, organizing free-to-thepublic readings of ancient Greek tragedies to initiate community discussions around varied forms of trauma. Its central and first project, the eponymous “Theater of War,” arose out of a groundbreaking partnership with the Department of Defense to organize readings of Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” at U.S. military bases to prompt discussions on the wounds of war.
The company has since put together hundreds of events tackling issues such as sexual assault and domestic violence in communities around the world, from Fukushima, Japan, to Ferguson, Mo., where a version of Sophocles’ “Antigone” was performed with a choir that included both local police officers and community activists. Traveling with each performance is a rotation of almost 200 actors, many of whom are A-list stars. But the true event comes after the reading in the audience discussion.
On Thursday evening, the open forum provided a multifaceted and emotional dissection of the causes and effects of the various forms of gun violence in the community. Three of the five panel members and others in the packed crowd, many with direct roots in Bayview, had lost family members to vio-
“I want to hold him one more time. I want something tangible. I want to feel him. I want to embrace him. I want to smell his breath. And I got that sense of what Hercules meant. I need something tangible some days.” Gwen Woods, mother of Mario Woods, who was fatally shot by S.F. police
lence in San Francisco.
“We don’t call it black-on-black crime. We call it community violence,” said audience member Cephus Johnson, the uncle of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer in 2009. “Because white folks have crime in their community, but we don’t say ‘white-on-white (crime).’ So for us, all in this room — never say ‘black-on-black crime.’ That does us an injustice. It’s community violence.”
While not billed as an event focusing on race, the discussion often homed in on portions of the reading concerning generational curses and its real-world connection to the history, legacies and newfound mutations of antiblack racism that many said pervades neighborhoods like the Bayview.
“I fed so many kids in the Bayview. Put so many coats on their backs,” Woods said. “And you’ve got to understand the story. Our babies just didn’t become what you call these ‘monsters’ overnight.”
Woods referenced the introduction of crack cocaine into communities and its pipelining of black fathers into the prison industrial complex.
“We have to understand where all that (violence) comes from, because historically we’ve been in a struggle,” Johnson said. “So, yes, mental illness is real. Any time a family member experiences the type of trauma that we do when we lose a loved one in our life through a system that we thought would respect us and give us a right to true justice — (it’s) extremely painful.”
Alliance and action, from the audience and the nation at large, was challenged both optimistically (as an audience member called for partnership with San Francisco Pride) — and skeptically.
Do “you know why we haven’t risen from that thought that we’re supposed to be three-fifths of a human?” asked an outraged African American woman whose 19year-old son was shot and killed on his way to cash a check in 2015. “We haven’t risen because you in the United States of America have allowed all these black babies to be murdered. And no one has said a word.”
Answers were hard to come by, as is the essence of each Theater of War show, which is specifically intended to broach feelings of discomfort, said company founder and Artistic Director Bryan Doerries, who was recently named New York City’s public artist in residence.
“The point is not to have a resolution,” cast member and actress Linda Powell said after the event. “It’s to have a conversation and to have a safe space to have these raw emotions.”
A through line within the charged evening was the need for trauma to be expressed and for youth guidance to be made available. “When we don’t speak what’s in our hearts and tell what’s out there, it eats us up,” said panel member Shawn Richard, who lost two brothers to gun violence and is the founder and executive director of Brothers Against Guns. “And then we can’t deal with it, so what we do, we go out there and cause violence amongst violence.”
Richard called for audience members to exchange names and numbers at the end of the night to find ways to lend a hand in the community. As the night closed, audience members indeed mingled and embraced after a taxing evening brimming with hard truths.
“Cornel West said it like this, ‘If you want to hear the truth, you must let the suffering speak,’ ” Johnson said. “By allowing us to have this mike and share our story is not only healing, but is an awakening to yourselves that this struggle is real. And that we all have an obligation to become part of this movement to bringing real systemic change.”