Ajax in Iraq

Created through a series of workshops with the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training class of 2009, McLaughlin uses Sophocles’ Ajax to view and interpret the current war, combining ancient Greece and modern-day Iraq to explore a veteran’s madness and suicide.

The impetus for the project was the desire to investigate the notion of war in general and to respond to the on-going war in the Middle East in particular. McLaughlin specifically wished to understand that war from the point of view of the students in the Institute, members of the generation most directly effected by it. To that end, the first six months of the project were spent doing a series of workshops during which director Scott Zigler and McLaughlin urged the students to generate theatrical responses to war. The students all did interviews and independent research, and presented their findings. The wealth of subject matter included civil war letters, Korean comfort women, homeless veterans, military recruitment and soldiers’ blogs, to name a fraction. The presentations ranged from scenes and monologues to dance pieces to various forms of performance art. Over twenty-five hours of theatrical material was created and presented.