ARTicles vol. 7 i.1: Ellen McLaughlin on Ajax in Iraq

Ellen McLaughlin, an award-winning playwright and accomplished actress (the original Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America), has for the last year been developing a new play in collaboration with the A.R.T./MXAT Institute’s second-year graduate acting and dramaturgy students. Her residence at the A.R.T. has been made possible by a grant from Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Below, McLaughlin shares her thoughts about the process of writing the play and the sources she’s drawing from.

The idea of writing a piece with the A.R.T. Institute about the Iraq War occurred to me not because I thought I could do it, but because I thought I couldn’t not do it. We are five years into what may be an unending war and I, for one, have yet to make sense of it. I knew the only way I was ever going to be able to come to grips with it was through the medium I work in, the theatre. And I needed all the help I could get. Specifically, I needed the help of theatre artists from the generation of the people doing the fighting and dying in the war rather than from my own peers, the generation that is sending them over there. I wanted the play we came up with to be something that spoke for the students at least as much as it does for me. I’ve had my say. My generation has been talking about itself culturally for some time now. It was time to listen. So I asked the students to tell me what they thought, not only about this war but about war in general.

We met for several hours twice a week for a few weeks in the fall of 2007 and then again in the spring this year, and the students generated a great deal of theatrical material based on research and interviews, all related to war. The range of response was wide, the work nuanced and smart. We saw pieces about Korean comfort women, Supermax prison, Kurdish poetry, and the Crusades, to name a fraction. The collaborations were generous and effective, the presentations theatrically astute. I was bowled over.

While looking for a means of shaping this enormously varied wealth of material, I began to think about Sophocles’ thorny and challenging play Ajax, a tragedy about a veteran’s madness and suicide. I’ve adapted many Greek plays over the years and find the ancient Greeks particularly trenchant when it comes to their treatment of war, which all the great tragic playwrights knew intimately as veterans. The plays speak of war with candor and the wisdom born of the suffering war inevitably causes, no matter which side you’re on. Ajax is a figure of pathos at the same time that he is adamantly complex and difficult. But his pain, however much we wish to turn from it, compels our attention and our empathy. Looking at this play in the light of our times, his agony suddenly seems terribly modern. His voice can be heard in the voices of veterans speaking now about their experiences in Iraq. I came to feel that this disturbing and impossible play might be the means of grappling with this disturbing and impossible war.

These Greek plays – so ancient as to belong to no one – provide structures durable and capacious enough to encompass and shelter the new. They are the stories people have been telling and retelling for thousands of years in order to make sense of what they are living through. The talented and passionate students at the Institute and I are, I figure, in the grand tradition. We are speaking for these fraught and perplexing times. And we need, as I say, all the help we can get.