Theater of War Productions is one of the most exciting companies in the performance of ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays because they tie each performance to a particular social issue and use the performances as a jumping off point for discussions of the issue. Their recent version of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis was performed with the support of the New Jersey Hospice and Palliative Care Nurses Association, and featured nurses as the Chorus and in two of the main roles. The connections between the performance, the audience members who responded, and the play itself is one of the elements that makes a Theater of War performance so sensational.

Sophocles’ Women of Trachis takes place at the end of Heracles’ life. He has been off fighting, and he sends word back to his wife Deianeira and his son Hyllas that the battle is won and he’s coming home. He also sends back Iole, his war bride/concubine/sex slave. This does not sit entirely well with Deianeira, who decides to try and win back Heracles’ affection with a love potion given to her by the centaur Nessus, who made the potion from his blood while dying because of Heracles. Perhaps predictably, Nessus tricked Deianeira, giving her a horrible poison rather than a love potion, but she did not begin to suspect that until she had already sent the robe soaked in the fatal draught. Deianeira expresses her fears to the Chorus, and shortly afterwards her son Hyllas arrives accusing her of murdering Heracles. Rather than defending herself, Deianeira accepts her guilt and commits suicide. Hyllas realizes his mistake and takes back his condemnation of his mother. Heracles is then brought on for an extended scene where he complains of the agony he’s experiencing, condemns Deianeira and expresses the wish to brutally murder her, recounts his great deeds, and then essentially uses emotional blackmail to convince his son to build a funeral pyre and set him on fire and then to marry Iole.

The Theater of War performance, done over Zoom, included the portion of Sophocles’ play in which Deianeira (Elizabeth Marvel) begins to fear she may have accidentally poisoned her husband, Hyllas’ (Craig Manbauman) condemnation then repentance, and Heracles’ (David Denman) experience of his painful demise. This show cut the first portion of the play in order to focus more specifically on the section relating to Heracles’ death, which is much more relevant and connected to the experience of hospice and palliative care nurses with whom the company collaborated for this project. The experiences of Deianeira’s grief and guilt, Hyllas’ difficulty processing Heracles’ suffering, and Heracles’ anger, pain, and trauma all resonated with the lived experiences of these nurses—points they made eloquently in the discussion after the reading of the script itself.

The three members of the Chorus (Angie Meraviglia, Dawn Fort, and Sharon A. Campbell) are all nurses, as is Manbauman and Charlaine Lasse, who played the Nurse. For me, the strongest performance of the night was actually Lasse. In her post-show comments, she said that as a post-natal care and NICU nurse—dealing with newly born babies who need immediate medical attention, often intensive care—she has to balance between loving her patients, but not being in love with them. That tension between being devoted to helping them, but not being so devoted that when patients do inevitably die she is unable to cope. Lasse was able to bring this tension to the Nurse’s role, which is essentially that of a messenger in this portion of the play, reporting Deianeira’s suicide to the Chorus. Her performance was natural and her reading of the lines crisp and clean, giving the impression not of saying lines written millennia ago, but of speaking from the heart as someone who has lived this experience of loss.

The other really strong performance was by Manbauman, who did a masterful job shifting through Hyllas’ competing emotions within the play. Manbauman was able to effectly portray the anger of a son who feels betrayed when he thinks he mother murdered his father, then the remorse of a son who knows he has helped drive his mother to suicide, then the tensions between his own desire to do what’s right and his (emotionally abusive) father’s demands of him.

Denman’s Heracles was probably the weakest of the performances, in large part because the role doesn’t lend itself to be played on Zoom. The performance was over-the-top, with a lot of roaring, excessive facial expressions, and an intensity that didn’t translate well over Zoom.

Again, though, what makes Theater of War Productions truly a unique company is that their performances are the catalyst for discussions among people immediately impacted by the issues raised by the plays. Following the performance itself, the floor was opened to the nurse-performers to discuss what resonated with them in the play, or what struck them as most important. Then the floor opened up to comments from the audience. And it is this approach to active engagement that defines Theater of War. They try not just to present the ancient plays, or even just to make them relevant to modern audiences, but to create spaces of discussion—a kind of Athenian democracy inspired approach—in which members of a community come together to collectively make meaning of these plays.