The New Yorker Radio Hour - Margaret Atwood, Evangelizing Against Climate Change, and Greek Tragedy

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

Margaret Atwood’s realism, an evangelical climate scientist, and the dangers of working from home. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

911, what's your emergency? Hi, I work from home. Okay, is anyone else there with you, sir? No, I'm alone. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. And when was the last time you saw someone else? My wife, this morning, I guess. Okay, let's go ahead and open up the blinds.

Okay, let some light in. How much light? Just a little is fine. I did it. It's bright. I feel so bright on my face That's good That's how it's supposed to feel

I need you to tell me what you're wearing Okay You know, uh, just regular clothes Outside clothes or inside clothes Well, let me check Pajamas I'm wearing my pajamas I swore I changed into regular

I thought these were jeans It's okay, sir, calm down Wait, this isn't even a shirt It's just my skin, God damn it Can we assume that you haven't showered today? I don't know Okay, I need you to walk over to the bathroom and see if your towel is damp. Okay, can you do that for me?

Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, I'm walking over there. Okay, I'm here. I'm in the bathroom. I see my towel. It's dry. It's a dry towel.

Okay, that's okay. What is your name, sir? Robert. Robert, I'm Charisse. Hi, Sheree. You did the right thing by calling me. today, Robert. I'm going to get some people over there soon to help you, okay? Now, Robert, did you eat anything today?

I keep putting things in my mouth a lot. Are you eating now, Robert? Can you tell me what food you've eaten today? I don't exactly... I mean, I started out with breakfast before my life left for work. I think maybe I had a bowl of cereal when she left. Is that it? Like an hour or so later, I had a banana with peanut butter.

Did you slice the banana? Nope. I dipped it right into the jar. because no one was watching. No one watches. And did you have lunch after that, or was that lunch? I remember ham. Lots of ham.

In a sandwich? No. No sandwich. Just ham pieces. That's okay. Did you get any work done today? I don't think so. I was supposed to make a deck for a meeting, and I, uh, I started it.

I started the deck. And then he stopped? Well, the internet has fun things for me to do, so, so I did them. What kind of things? I watched a video about Mirkats. A documentary? Yeah. And then that led me to other videos that weren't documentaries.

Okay, so you started watching pornography? Yes. You went from Mirkats straight to pornography? That's right, yeah. And how long did you spend watching videos? It doesn't really matter because I make my own schedule, you know? Robert. You need you to stay with me.

I'll be there shortly. The EMTs are going to help you get that deck ready and get you showered and changed. Thank you. Until they get there, no more eating and no more mere cat videos, okay? I work from home. Are you chewing? I work from home. And I guess that's why I rarely do.

Work from home, I mean. That's a piece by Colin Nissen from the New Yorker's Department of Shouts and Murmors. It was performed for the radio hour by Bill Hader and Kristen Wigg. I'm David Remnick, and thanks so much for. for joining us. Now, next weekend, scientists from all over the country are going to be marching in Washington. Thousands of people who believe in the science of climate change will show their support for the environment and the political reforms needed to preserve it. Needless to say, many more people who think, as the president does, that climate change is a hoax, will not be at the

march, which is where a woman named Catherine Hayho comes in. Hayho is a climate scientist at Texas tech and Lubbock, and you can find her all over YouTube and television advocating for climate change. She's also an evangelical Christian, and she spends time in churches across the country trying to convince a tough audience of conservative skeptics that a belief in God can be reconciled with a belief in science. Now, you're known for being a kind of master communicator when it comes to getting Christians, devout Christians, to adopt the fight against climate change. How are you going about putting that message in front of people? What is your approach, your tactics? The way I talk about this issue is the first thing I do is not pulling out the

science, not, you know, getting all the data out and just saying, look, here's the data and if you don't agree with it, you know, you're an idiot. That is the absolute worst thing that we can do in any argument, really. Why is that? That was the, you say, that's the Al Gore approach. Here are my slides, here's the, here's the fact-based evidence. Why is that a bad approach? It works if we're already convinced of the reality of the issue and we want the information to inform our decisions over how concerned we need to be and what we can do about it. Whereas if we're talking to people who are very genuinely skeptical or if they're, I think, doubtful is a better word. In talking to them, the first thing I do is I start by connecting

over a value or a concern that we already share. If I'm giving a chapel service at a Christian college, I start with almost a statement of belief. This is what I believe, and I know you do too, about God and the Bible and this planet that we live on. If I'm talking to water managers, I start by talking about water. I talk about our droughts and our floods and our incredible variability that we see here in Texas. I talk about something that I know we agree on until we're nodding along together. And only then do I do some explaining on how things have already changed in the places where we live and how we expect them to change in the future. Now, this all suggests that you must have a hell of a marriage because your husband's an academic

and he's a pastor as well. And the two of you co-wrote a book together called A Climate for Change, Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. But as I understand it, when the two of you married, he was a climate change denier. How did he come around? Well, he grew up in a conservative Republican family. His dad was a Republican politician and a lawyer. His former girlfriend was her father was the head of the Gun Owners of America Association. And so he had never met someone who shared his beliefs and his faith who thought that climate change was real. But coming from Canada, I had never met anybody who didn't think climate change is real. So we had actually been married about six months before the penny dropped on that one. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I want to know all about that. So how did the penny drop through the powers of personal persuasion or scientific proof at the dinner table? Well, it came up because I was already working in the field, but I was working a bit down in the weeds on the issues of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and how we might meet international targets through reducing methane. And so I was doing chemical modeling.

So he knew I was an atmospheric science, but he hadn't really put the pieces together. And, you know, this was a while back. This was more than 15 years ago when climate change wasn't really in the news like it is today. And so he knew what I did, but he hadn't quite figured out that it was all about climate change until maybe I think casually over dinner one night I was talking about, oh, well, my next project is going to be looking at climate change impacts on the Great Lakes. And he was like, what? What are you talking about? Did you beat him into intellectual submission? How did he, how did you change his mind?

Or did you change his mind? Yes, yes. His mind has changed, but not through any beating intellectual submission. Here's the thing. All right, point taken. Yes. He is a very smart person. So he understands statistics.

He understands the scientific method. He understands experiments in peer review. He understands all those. And I thought, well, here's a really smart person who says it isn't true. Let's explore his reasons. And we went through all the science together. For him, one of the biggest turning points was downloading NASA's temperature data set to his own computer and plotting global temperature. And at that point, he said it was like Occam's razor.

He had a choice to make. And what was the simplest choice? Was NASA involved in this global worldwide conspiracy for decades? Or was NASA, who put men on the moon, actually correct when they said the planet was warming? So that was a big turning point for him. But then after that, we got into more of the ideological issues, the questions about solutions. And does this mean loss of personal liberties and complete destruction of the economy and government control and all that? So I learned so much about the real reasons why people object to this issue from him.

What is what's the resistance? What's the nature of the resistance? We believe and to a certain extent we've been told that acting on climate means incredible loss. It means loss of our comfortable lifestyles. It means loss of freedom. It might mean government telling me what to do. I was talking to a group of water managers a year or so ago down in South Texas. And at the end of my talk, which was all about water and then how it's changing in the future and how we can conserve in the future, an older gentleman at the back stood up and he said, you know, I was really doubtful about what you had to say, but everything you've said makes sense. I agree with you. Things are changing and we need to prepare. The problem I have, he said, very honestly, is that I don't want the government setting my thermostat. That is the idea people have. In the past few weeks, Trump has taken significant steps to nullify the work of the Obama administration on climate change. And it may well turn out that he's going to turn against the Paris Agreement as a whole. Do you have any hope of being able to work with the Trump administration?

Do you see that there's any way to reach the Trump administration on this issue? When they first came in, I know that there was hope among myself, other scientists, other policy people. Right now, I don't see the hope. I literally do not because they're doing things that make no common sense. For example, investing in and shoring up the coal industry. Coal jobs have been declining for three decades already. They've been in free fall the last decade, not because of the clean power plan. It hadn't even really gone into effect yet.

It's because simply natural gas prices are lower and renewable energy prices are dropping even faster. So I see them making decisions that just make no sense from an economic perspective, let alone from a climate perspective. So how hopeful am I that we can move in the right direction over the next few years? At the federal level, I am not very hopeful. But at the state, at the city level, and in the tech sector, and even the energy sector, I am hopeful because over the last eight years, under an administration that was doing everything it could to take action on climate, even in those circumstances, the majority of the positive forward momentum was happening below the federal level. It was driven by economics. It was driven by the necessity to build resilience in vulnerable areas. And that work is continuing right here in Texas as well as around the United States.

You know, you see people in high positions of power, educated people, people who have no reason not to know denying climate change to this day in the Senate, in the Congress. What's to blame there? How to account for that? Well, here's the fascinating thing. This applies to people in Congress and the Senate as well to, you know, my next-door neighbor or the person down the street. When someone says they don't agree with the science of climate change, they will use science-y-sounding arguments. It's just a natural cycle. The science isn't certain.

Or sometimes they'll use religiously-sounding arguments. God's in control. He'd never let this happen or the world's going to end anyways. Why do we care? But if we dig below the surface, we find that you know what? Their objections have nothing to do with science. And they have nothing to do with religion. They have everything to do with solution aversion.

And in fact, the vast majority of members of Congress who publicly say climate change isn't real, behind closed doors, and I have even seen some of them do this, behind closed doors, they'll say, oh, yes, of course it's real. But I don't want to fix it. Who's done that? And so it's easier. It's easier to say it isn't real. than to say, sure, it's real, but I don't want to fix it. Who have you heard do that?

I have heard several people say that, and I would rather not say publicly who they are. Well, for the greater cause of truth, I mean, if you believe in the urgency of this issue, don't you think that should be brought out into the light? Well, what I do think is a positive way forward is the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which is what Citizens Climate Lobby has been putting together, and they just announced 10 new members. No, whoa, whoa, whoa. So right now. Excuse me.

That's that, in all respect, that's a talking point. Yes. What politicians do you hear that deny climate change in public and then behind closed doors say, yeah, I know it's true, but I can't say that. Okay. Well, sorry, I was going there. If you could just let me finish my thought. Okay. Okay.

So my thought is this. There is this bipartisan climate solutions caucus, which is incredible. I mean, they have 17 members from the Democrat Party and 17 members now from the Republican Party. No Democrat can enter unless they have a Republican partner. But right now, politically, it is scary for people to kind of literally, I don't mean to belittle this, but to come out of the closet and to say, yes, as a Republican, I agree climate change is real because they look at the example of Bob Inglis. Bob Inglis is a very conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. Bob Inglis announced that he supported climate change. He was beaten in the primaries in his own state.

And so it's almost the case where Republican members of Congress are taken into this room and sat in this chair with a portrait of Bob on the wall and said, here is what will happen to you, too, if you announce this. But I think it is irresponsible of me to actually say who it is who's next in line because they are afraid and they are waiting until the next time, or the right time, I should say. I guess, Catherine, the question has to arise. What kind of backlash do you get among your listeners in the religious community, broadly speaking? How many people are really responding and changing their minds? I would say that for every one letter or comment or email I get saying, well, you're not a real scientist because you're a Christian. I get about 100 saying, well, you're not a real Christian because you're a scientist. And it absolutely breaks my heart that we've been fed this series of lies that somehow if we're a Christian,

then Genesis, where it says that we have responsibility of the earth doesn't apply to us. and Revelation where it says God will destroy those who destroy the earth somehow isn't part of the Bible. And especially all the middle parts, where it talks about loving your neighbor and caring for those who are in need and watching out for the poor and the needy, somehow the middle of the Bible doesn't matter to us either. We live in a really strange era where our faith has been hijacked by our politics and climate change is one of the biggest casualties. Catherine Hayho, thank you so much. My pleasure. Catherine Hayho is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech.

In a minute, the novelist Margaret Atwood talks about her dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale, which in her eyes was just a straightforward piece of realism. Okay, I didn't create that world. I reflected that world, and I put nothing into the book that had not already happened at some point at some time to someone. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Something funny happened on November 9th, or a lot of funny things, but among them, somewhere way down the list, is this.

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, just took off. In the months after the election, sales of the novel were up 200% compared to the year before, and the book flew to the top of Amazon's literary bestseller list, along with 9%. 1984 by George Orwell and other dystopian tales. Now, it's not that the Republican platform called for the enslavement of women, let's not go that far, but somehow the combination of Mike Pence's very hyper-traditional view of women, let's say, and Donald Trump's kind of Hugh Hefner view of women made a lot of people think very hard about Atwood's novel, where women are divided into wives, housekeepers, and childbearers, and all of them are the property of men.

At the Women's March in Washington, the day after the inauguration, there was one widely photograph sign that said, make Margaret Atwood fiction again. The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, and there's a new television adaptation coming from Hulu this month. Margaret Atwood is 77, and she spoke recently with the New Yorkers, Rebecca Mead. You know, I'd love it if you would read a passage for us from early on in The Handmaid's Tale. This is a moment when Offred, the central character, is walking down the street and we are learning about her world from which she has come. Yep. And what she says is this.

The sidewalks here are cement. Like a child, I avoid stepping on the cracks. I'm remembering my feet on these sidewalks in the time before, and what I used to wear on them. Sometimes it was shoes for running with cushioned souls and breathing holes and stars of fluorescent fabric that reflected light in the darkness, though I never ran at night, and in the daytime only beside well-frequented roads. Women were not protected then. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out, but that every woman knew. Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the

police make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't go into a laundromat by yourself at night. I think about laundromats. When I wore to them, shorts, jeans, jogging pants, what I put into them. My own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control. Now we walk along the same street in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us, no one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom too. Now you're being given freedom from. Don't underwrite it.

Good Lord. The book is so chilling and so bleak. And I wonder to write about that world, what kind of toll it took on you while you were doing it? I think it's a slight myth that writing a book that is working, when it's working, takes a toll on the writer. I think what takes a toll is when you're writing a book that isn't working out. So that is pretty debilitating, but when something is going along quite quickly, you're actually pretty energized. Even when the world that you're creating is such a bleak, Okay, I didn't create that world. I reflected that world. As far as I was concerned, I was reflecting the world that already existed. I didn't do anything that people hadn't already done, in other words, and therefore were quite capable of doing again. So I was

reflecting the world. I wasn't thinking it up. And to that extent, I think it's cathartic to write about those things that are real and to put them out there. So sales of The Handmaid's Tale rocketed up after the election of Donald Trump, but he's not an exemplar of Puritan values or the kind of values that are described in the novel. So I wondered whether that made sense to you that the book took off in the way that it did. He is not, but a lot of people in his quote, base are. So how did they reconcile that? You can do that quite easily, the Bible being such a various document, and you come to the passages where God is using some king or other of reprehensible

values to fulfill his plan. So the way they justified it was, well, to put it mildly, He isn't Jesus, but he will help us get some of the righteous things that we want. I wanted to talk to you about your upbringing. You had a pretty unusual upbringing, much of your childhood you spent in the remote wilderness of the north of Canada, where your father was studying insect life. And I wondered if you could talk to me a little bit about what that was like up there. Okay, so it wasn't so unusual then as it would be now. It was pretty remote at that time.

I think when he first went to that location, there was no road. So very technology light. So no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets, books, shortwave radio, but all you could really get on it was Russia. and that was it. So how did you spend your time? Well, when we were of school age, which wasn't, of course, for the first five years or so, my mother would just get the workbooks from the school and we would fill them out.

And if you filled them out really quickly, then you could do whatever you liked, so it made me superficial and speedy. Characteristics you're very well known for. And it's true. Hardly. Yes, I'm a very fast reader, for instance. How do you think that this experience of this kind of childhood shaped the kind of writer that you became?

Very luckily, I'm not my own biographer. I'm deeply grateful for that. And also I'm not my own psychiatrist. So I don't even want to speculate on that because in order to make any meaningful statement about it at all, I would have to have another me. And that other me would have grown up in some other way. And then we could compare the me than I am with that other me, genetically identical, who had grown up in some other way, and then we could say something about it.

You see, I did grow up with the biologist, so we just don't say anything about these things unless you can actually say something meaningful, accurate. Right. You mentioned to me when we were talking at one point about wanting to be the kind of girl who got to wear a frilly dress, frilly print dress, but your mother didn't let you have a frilly pink dress. No, no. It's not that she didn't let me. It didn't occur to her. It wasn't in her head. Right. So if I had said, I want a frilly pink dress, maybe she would have got me one, but of course I was not a very demanding child in that way. So I think my mother went shopping, you know, mother-daughter shopping, that big cliche. I think that happened to me once.

Do you remember what you bought? Absolutely. The first high school formal, we got an ice blue brocade formal, and in those days you got the brocade shoes dyed to match. So she underwent that with me. I think it was a big sacrifice. You have to understand that my dad picked out her clothes. She was not interested in it.

So the gender roles in your house were quite unusual for the time. They were unusual but not reversed. So I think it was that period of culture, and you can go back and read sort of how-to books for wives and husbands of the, I think from the Edwardian age until after the war, it was the sort of chums model, you know, that your spouse was supposed to be your chum or your pal. That may seem unusual now, but it wasn't so unusual for the time. They just had a lot of activities that they love to do, and they could do chums things together like canoe trips.

But you don't do canoe trips in a frilly dress. That's right. I love the chums model of marriage. Yes. Do you remember a first moment or an early moment of experiencing sexism or recognizing it? Well, you didn't call it that. I mean, you could go back and describe stuff that happened, but it wouldn't have been called sexism.

For instance, I was of the age when there was these schoolhouses that were built probably in the 19th century out of red, brick. And there was the girls' playground and the boys' playground. And so boys could come on to that side and play marbles, but you could not go on to the other side and play soccer. So gender roles, definitely there were gender roles. But nobody thought anything about it, because when you're in the middle of something like that, it seems normal to you. It didn't seem entirely normal to me because of how I grew up, but I was very interested in it. Did you ever have that experience of thinking, God, I wish I was a boy. It's better for them.

No, I didn't. Sorry. I suppose because I wasn't wildly discriminated against growing up as a girl. I wasn't told that there were a lot of things I couldn't do because I was a girl. Lucky you. Well, lucky me. I think a lot of the people I went to high school with and even college with were because they'd come from communities. And you can read all about this in Alice Monroe in those small town communities about the worst thing that could happen to you was that you would be laughed at. And somehow I just, I missed that part. I think he kind of have to have missed that part if you're going to be a writer. Because you're risk making an idiot of yourself every time you publish something.

You have to have missed the crippling self-consciousness of adolescence. Well, I think, you know, I think everybody's. a bit self-conscious about some things, such as their appearance. So I did all of the things that people probably do, which is different shades of lipstick, and what do I look like upside down? But I don't recall being crippled by it. Were you crippled by crippling self-consciousness?

I'm crippled by it right the second. No, I'm joking. No. No. I wanted to ask you about the feminist label. This is something that in the past I've read, that you've sort of slightly balked at being described as a feminist writer. Because there are so many meanings of that word.

I'm very happy to put my hand up for one box that's feminist on it. There are a lot of other boxes. So which box labeled feminist are we talking about? Which box labeled feminist are you? The one I put my hand up for. Women are human beings. Hand up. Yes, I'm for that.

Fairness in hiring practices. Fairness in equal pay for work of equal value. Reforming the legal system so that there is a better process for dealing with sex. assault crimes, hands up. However, human beings often do wonderful things and human beings can also do terrible things. And if women are human beings, they're not exempt from doing terrible things. So Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 wax and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. But she got off on that because the feminists of the day said a woman could not ever possibly do a murder like that. Wrong.

What I'm not for is some notion that women, because they're women, are by virtue of being women, more virtuous and noble. You've written so many books, and so many of them are still so widely read. Alias Grace is being adapted as a miniseries too, so we're lucky this year in having both Hulu doing The Handmaid's Tale and Netflix doing Alias Grays. Grace. But probably the book that's going to define you is The Handmaid's Tale. Well, are you okay with it? Are you? Will I care? Will I care? I assume at the point at which it's going to define me, I will be dead. Is that what we're saying? I suppose that's a very healthy way to look at it. Yeah, well, it's not going to actually bother me one way or the other once I'm dead. I mean, people keep asking me,

What do you think your legacy is going to be? Said, well, you know, apart from pieces of property that I'm leaving to my descendants, what are you talking about? Really? Yeah, but you see, time moves on. And what typically happens to a well-known writer when they die is, first of all, they have a big uptick as everybody either goes boo-hoo or else boo. You know, they get both evaluated and denounced.

and then people lose interest because it's a new and different generation. And then after a while, you know, it happened to George Elliott, then you might get a resurgence or you might not. You might just vanish into oblivion. And that will also depend on what government is in power and what the literary fashions of the day are. One hopes there will be readers. One hopes people will still be reading books.

I think that would be wonderful. And if they are still reading books, maybe they will read some of my books, but it will be as it is now. That is, some people like them, other people don't. Right. This is a small thing in the history of humanity. Of course, being Canadian, I'm always saying things like that. We go in for self-balloon puncturing just so nobody will accuse us of having a swelled head. Margaret Atwood talking with the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead.

Rebecca wrote a profile of Margaret Atwood, and you can find that piece at new yorkerradio.org. Hulu's adaptation of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale premieres on April 26th, and Netflix's alias grace comes later this year. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Much more to come this hour. Stick around.

Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This last week, everyone at the magazine gathered in the hall, to celebrate our longtime staff writer and my dear friend and colleague, Hilton Alls, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Hilton is a critic, but a critic who makes his entire self known to the reader

no less than a novelist or a poet. Hilton started writing for the New Yorker in 1994 and became a theater critic in 2002. Though he won for his work as a theater critic, he could just as easily have won for his outstanding essay on the movie Moonlight, or another essay on Beyonce, or Ponce, past work on Derek Walcott,

Missy Elliott, or his own personal history. A couple of days after the announcement and the champagne, Hilton came in for a visit. How do you feel? Well, it's a very, writers, as you know, are not used to. Public acclaim.

And so it felt when I left your office after we watched it together. We watched a live stream of the announcement. stream and we'll be honest with you is that I burst into tears after I left your office and saw the faces standing up to. You know, we've been at the magazine about the same amount of time. And in all you've done, theater criticism has been the main thing in the last almost 20 years now, 18 years, whatever it is. But you've written so many profiles, critical pieces, essays, personal essays about your family and much more. but there's a kind of mission to what you're doing. I always, I've loved the magazine since 1973 when Patrick O'Connor, who was one of the great paperback publishers, gave me a subscription.

And it used to come a brown paper wrapper. And I always, always perked up when I would see something by Andrea Lee about Black Philadelphia Life or Jamaica Kincaid or, Derek Wolcott or Jervis Anderson was a huge favorite of mine. I thought he was a great reporter. But it felt as if these different stories were sort of guest starring roles as opposed to part of the general conversation. So when I started to write here, I wanted people of color to really be part of the conversation. And this is Wadhelm. This is about 19, when I first wrote a talk story or something, so it would be 1991.

But I felt that it was very important to not make color a specialty item, that it was part of the conversation, whether it... And I just thought there were so many writers of color whom I loved. I just wanted the conversation to get bigger. So I would just assign my... myself, so as you as famously, I would just start reporting something. And if someone liked it, they liked it. There was no assignment from Missy Elliott. I just went to Virginia and followed her. Let me ask you about being a critic, a theater critic. Does there come a point where you say to yourself, it never runs out, or do you come up against a wall? Do you get tired of it? Does the seasons begin to

resemble each other? No, because there are always great people coming up. And that's really what keeps you going, not the fourth revival of the Glass Menagerie, but young people like Lynn Nottagin, just a whole crew of people who are not going to really sort of let theater become standardized. That's what's great. I wonder if it's possible of all your theater going, just to close

out, if there was, if there's one night in the theater that you can single out as transcendent and the kind of thing that you go to the theater hoping for again? I think two different kinds of productions that I've seen. One was at the classical theater of Harlem when they did Jean-Gene's The Blacks. And I remember writing you a note about it saying, this is what I want to do. And the second thing was Bet Midler. Twice. Once in her live show. And secondly, when she played Sue Mangers on Broadway, she really... What was the name of that show?

I'll eat you last, Sue Mangers. It was one of the great things, along with her live, her one-woman show, because it's that old thing that is so rarely, you can't teach it. So a lot of these great actors and truly great actors, they have lots of star qualities, but they do not have that push to get out there and give you a great show at any cost. She just gets out there and she wants to give you a great show. Hilton, thank you so much. And again, congratulations.

Thanks, David. That's the inimitable Hilton Alls, who just won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. My name's Brian Dorees. I'm the founder of Theater of War, and I'm honored to be here. A couple of weeks ago, a group of actors took the stage at WNYC's Jerome L. Green performance space, and it was not the usual. theatrical fair. They were presenting excerpts from two plays that are more than 2,000 years old. Tonight marks the 377th performance of Theater of War since we got off the ground back in 2008. And over the last close to 10 years now, we performed all over the world from the Pentagon to

homeless shelters, to VA facilities, to Japan, Germany, U.S. Army facilities across the United States, even in Gitmo, where we went twice. Theater of War uses ancient Greek tragedies to help military veterans and their families talk about the realities of war and its aftermath. The group's founder, Brian Dorese, says the Greeks use the plays in the very same way. So tonight we're going to perform six scenes at breakneck speed of two ancient Greek plays written by Sophocles, who was a general in the Athenian army. He was elected general twice, and these ancient plays were performed for, as many as 17,000 citizen soldiers who sat in the center of Athens and the Theater of Dionysus

shoulder to shoulder with the generals in the front row and the hop-light cadets in the nosebleed section in the back. They sat and watched these plays in a century in which the Athenians saw nearly 80 years of war. The performers in Theater of War have included Paul Giamatti, Blythein, John Tuturo, Samira Wiley, and David Stratharine. Stratharne took on the role of the Greek warrior Philoctides, who's abandoned on an island for nine years by his comrades after he's injured on the way to the Trojan War. Francis McDormant and Catherine Irby were on stage with him. I am wretched, hated by the gods if men don't know my story. Those who discarded my weak body now laugh silently while the disease grows stronger each day. I am philuctides.

The keeper of Heracles' bow, whom the generals and Odysseus abandoned. Suffering from a snake bite, they left me here to die and tattered rags, sleeping in a jagged cave, starving without much food to eat. Oh, I only wish the same for them. Imagine my surprise, sun, when I awoke, the tears I shed, the sound of my sadness, all of the ships in the fleet had vanished. Alone with my infection, I only knew, pain. Son, this is what they have done to me, the Greek generals and Odysseus. Oh, I only pray the

Olympian gods, it is it them with proportionate suffering. I pity you, son of Poias. And I know what you mean about Odysseus and the sons of Atreus. They are evil men. I'm sorry, son. I want to hear more about your troubles. The New Yorkers Robin Wright is reported for more than a hundred countries, often from wars and conflict zones. But this fall, she turned briefly theater critic. Hi, Brian. Hi, Robin. How are you? I'm doing well, thanks. She wrote about Theater of War for the New Yorker, and she recently spoke with its founder Brian Dury's. I've been covering wars now for more than four decades. And when I first saw Theater of War, it really spoke to me personally. It addressed issues I hadn't even realized that I was trying to cope with these many years later. So I

thank you both for bringing this project to life and particularly for bringing it to my life. The ancient Greeks represented the first militarized democracy. And what's really striking about listening to your plays is their honesty in confronting it among their own combat forces is so much more advanced than what's happened in the U.S. military. How did they deal with it so much more honestly? I mean, first of all, what's so remarkable about fifth century Athens is that the Greeks saw nearly 80 years of war. Sophocles, whose plays we perform, was a general, and he was elected general twice. And, of course, the audience would have been composed of as many as 17,000 citizen soldiers.

Seen from this perspective, ancient Greek drama seems like this very deluxe. deliberate and powerful tool developed out of a need to communalize the experience of war. These weren't simply entertainment, but they were a way of passing down really crucial institutional knowledge between generations of veterans about subjects like what we now call PTSD or suicide or what they might have called divine madness. As you said, 2.7 million people served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria of our citizens, but of course, nothing to be further from ancient Athens. It was 100% compulsory service.

So the divide between civilian and soldier has never been greater in our democracy. And it's for that reason that performances like what we do create spaces so that other people can collectively shoulder the burden of those stories. and we're not saying to veterans, hey, you, you shoulder the burden of what happened in war. As we civilians sort of naively act as if we can wipe off the blood and walk away because we didn't agree with the foreign policy decisions that sent these volunteer service members into war. I want to share a moment from the play Ajax, who was a great Greek warrior consumed with rage during the ninth year of the Trojan War. Yeah, so Ajax, who's a great Greek warrior, who's a great Greek warrior, consumed with rage during the ninth year of the Trojan war.

great decorated warrior, lost his best friend Achilles in battle, and commits an act of violence where he tries to kill his commanding officers and ends up blinded by Athena, killing animals instead, cows and goats. And covered in their blood and consumed with shame, he then, as he wakes up to what he's actually done out of this dissociative rage, he begins to contemplate suicide. And you hear in that excerpt something so remarkable from my perspective, because not only does philosophically stage the suicide of this great warrior. He does so on stage, which was never done in the ancient world. But he also takes us through step by step by step, the insidious logic of someone who's thinking about killing himself. So what should I do now? The God take me. The Greeks loathe me. The Trojans despise me. Perhaps I should set sail for home across the open sea, leaving behind ship. and men and the sons of Aetrius.

But what will I say to my father, Tell him I, when he sees my face? How will he even bear to look at me when I explain how I disgraced a family name for which he fought so hard? His heart will break right then and there. When a man suffers without end in sight and takes no pleasure in living his life day by day by day,

wishing for death, he should not live out all his years. It is pitiful when men holds on the false hopes. A great man must live in honor or die an honorable death. Why do you think it is that American service members relate to the character of Ajax in the 21st century? Well, one of the things that seem to, there are some things about the play that just transcend time. Not everything does. partly by design, you know, we're not, we don't do documentary theater. This is not, we're not holding up a mirror to the audience and saying, this is you. We're taking this ancient text and we're

sort of pulling back from it and we're saying, you know, this is a strange text from a different culture and a different time, but what does you see of yourself in this story across thousands of years and let people make their own connections? So people, often Marines and soldiers and sailors and airmen, will hear the story of Ajax and they will respond to his rage. And they'll also respond, I think, almost universally to the guilt that he feels at having survived after losing his best friend and his shame at having committed an act that went against the grain of his own moral compass that he didn't feel in control of. There's an interactive component in every one of your plays, and in many ways what happens after the performance is as important as the performance itself. Yeah, so after the performance, in this little discussion period we had scheduled for 45 minutes, and the discussion we scheduled for 45 minutes lasted three and a half hours and had to be cut off around midnight. And the first person who ever spoke at a theater of war performance was a military spouse.

and I'll never forget because she approached the microphone and she said, Hello, my name is Marshall. I'm the wife of a Navy SEAL and I'm the proud mother of a Marine. And my husband went away four times to war. And each time he came back dragging invisible bodies into our house, just like Ajax, the war came home with him. And to quote from the play, our home is a slaughterhouse. At one recent talkback session, an officer who's also a mental health counselor,

wanted to talk about how the story of Ajax spoke directly to him. So I'm required to let you know that the opinions that I've voiced tonight are my personal opinions and not the opinions of the United States military. So my name's Joe, Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, battalion commander, And it was one year ago this month that my best friend, fellow warrior, comrade, Tim O'Connor, killed himself. And it was tonight that Tim was speaking to me through Ajax. Calm death. Visit me.

Cut my throat and my suffering. I imagine that Tim was saying something very similar when he shot himself in isolation in a hotel parking lot. So the infantry side of me, thanks to my Ranger Creed, which I live and die by, never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy. Just like Philotides's comrades left him into the hands of the enemy, the enemy being in isolation. So we let Tim slip into the hands of the enemy. But never again. Never again. So thank you.

Greek tragedy can sometimes seem so pessimistic. What is it about these plays that you felt would not just resonate, but maybe even uplift or inspire or perhaps even help heal your audiences? I think we all, when we were taught Greek tragedy, we learned that Greek tragedy was this sort of, as you said, pessimistic expression of this fatalistic culture. that basically described human beings as barely able to apprehend the forces at work upon us until it's too late and we've destroyed ourselves, sometimes milliseconds too late in Greek tragedy, and we've destroyed our families and generations to come.

And while that is what happens on stage in many of these plays, I think what we've missed all these thousands of years is that that's not necessarily the response they provoke in an audience that's come together to watch them. the plays. And I was reminded just thinking about that of an early response we had from a soldier who was sitting in an audience in Germany on a U.S. Army concern. And he had deployed to Iraq. And he said, I think Sophocles wrote these plays to boost morale. And he was responding to a question I often ask audiences, why do you think Sophocles wrote the play? And I said, look,

what's morale boosting about these plays? And before I could finish asking the question, and he said, because they're the truth, and because the truth isn't being whitewashed, and because we're all sitting here acknowledging it shoulder to shoulder. And for me, that was a huge lesson that Greek tragedy, while on stage depicted these individuals whose lives were coming apart before our very eyes, but for audiences, counterintuitively, the response can be one of relief

to see themselves reflected in a story. And what I've noticed is people after performances describe feeling, they say they're buzzing. Often they talk about feeling relief. And I've noticed people come back time and time again to Theater of War. People say this is my 12th time seeing Theater of War. We have, you know, kind of Theater of War groupies.

And they always seem to be getting something new and the sense that they're doing something or contributing something by saying something that otherwise would have been so stigmatized and shameful that they would never have revealed it and it gives them permission and others' permission to do the same. I know I came away listening to the performances twice with a sense that there is a community that experiences these things

and the dark thoughts that all of us who have covered wars or been in war zones have felt. And that in itself is a kind of reassuring phenomena. it helps. That's Robin Wright talking with Brian Dory's, the artistic director for Theater of War. And they'll be performing across the country all this spring.

Brian, it's always great to talk to you. Let me know if you're back in Washington again. Yeah, we're going to come down and perform for the Joint Chiefs. And we're waiting on the date at the Pentagon. And as soon as I know it, I'm going to send it to you, Rob, because I'm hoping you can be there. That's it for today. Thanks for joining us.

Next week, I'll be talking with Elizabeth Warren. So please don't miss that. Till then, you can keep up with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo,

Rianne & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Michael Lee Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Becky Cooper, Jessica Henderson, and Johnny Vince Evans. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.