![]() ![]() After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.įor that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. In May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King,” starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence. Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. ![]() “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses - as the people who are closest to the patient - have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.” ![]() “Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves. The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) - except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. “It’s like giving blood - you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand … and on the other.’” “We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. ![]() “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.” “It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother - Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus - even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience - a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the author Margaret Atwood.īryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp ( “The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling ( “Orange Is the New Black”). The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday by Theater of War Productions. ![]()
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