Bryan Doerries is using Euripedes and Sophocles to help soldiers, generals and drone pilots deal with the horrors of war – and actors from Martin Sheen to Jake Gyllenhaal are queueing up to take part Bryan Doerries is a Brooklyn-based theatre director who has spent a great deal of his life in the presence of tragedy. In 1976, the year he was born, his father was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but refused to do much about it, and spent the next three decades descending into blindness, dementia, seizures, hallucinations. Only when his family were searching for a kidney donor for him did they learn that he had been adopted: Doerries’ real grandfather was a paediatrician, a Spanish migrant who had an affair with a Puerto Rican nurse and then gave the unwanted baby to the infertile couple he was treating. Later, when Doerries was in his mid-20s, his girlfriend Laura Rothenberg died. She was just 22. She had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was three days old, but had responded well to treatment, flourished and given great joy to many people around her, until, in the wake of a double lung transplant, her immune system started to reject the new organs. “I’d lost my girlfriend and father in short succession,” recalls Doerries. “I’d experienced death and suffering, and I really wanted to talk about it. I needed to create a kind of community.” Continue reading...
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