he recent tragedies at the World Trade Center and Pentagon hit pretty close to home.   Out of their midtown window, my parents saw the second plane hit and the towers fall.  My wife saw the Pentagon afire out of her office window and hurried home.  Like the rest of the country and much of the world, we’ve been in a state of shock and grief ever since.  People from 80 countries were killed in that act of mass murder, the most horrific single act of warfare on American soil in our history.

When the towers fell, my father started to recall memories from World War II for the first time in 50 years.  He was a front rifle scout in the occupation of Germany. Buildings were being hit and falling all around him. 

But this event was somewhat unique.  With buildings so tall that they could hold a total of 50,000 people and projectiles so powerful, 7000 people were killed in virtually a moment.   The only thing comparable in impact, in a single act, was the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Of course, we were officially at war at the time, but it was a horrific act against two islands full of innocent civilians

When an event that changes history happens in front of you, its momentousness cannot be contained.  It is hard to absorb the impact of the gigantic forces that these events unleash.  Aside from the thousands and thousands of people who have been thrust into direct grief for lost loved ones, the shock that we are vulnerable and part of the world at large, the world that includes Rwanda, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Kosovo, is almost too much to bear.  It reminds one of…Ancient Greece.   In the background of history, one hears the Trojan Women wailing for the men killed in the war, Clytemnestra crying for the murdered Iphigenia, Jason crying for his murdered wife and child, the artifice of the Trojan horse which led to slaughter…

In an event like this, the ring of history comes very close, ceases to feel like myth or legend and starts to seep into a reality that is too great to understand.  And so eventually, we retreat back into the world of drama to try to make sense of an impossibly senseless world.  We can grieve; we can perhaps see what happened in the light of a faithful enactment.  Perhaps a Greek tragedy can make us understand that our fate is not unique, but is part of the human story, the human tragedy, that has been going on since Homo sapiens clubbed Cro-Magnon into submission and then extinction, and a race of super-intellects capable of murder and detachment took over the planet. 

Perhaps, like the Greeks, who suffered so many wars and catastrophes in real life, we can find catharsis and some release from grief and woe in the re-enactment of the life’s horrors in drama.

Meanwhile, the real drama of real grief, of body parts mixed with rubble and thousands of names whose owners can’t be found, continues. The mass graves of Bosnia and Kosovo seem so much closer now.  The million bodies hacked up and piled along the rivers in Rwanda seem so much more real, if anyone remembers them.  And even more distant in our modern memory, the million dead in the killing fields of Cambodia mourn the Khmer Rouge’s ‘Year Zero’ eternally. 

Even further away, 20 million Russians purged by Stalin, and before that, 6 million Jews, 12 million Russians, countless others in World War II, which my father is just now remembering…

I have not heard of many plays about the Holocaust.  To be honest, I can’t think of any except for Anne Frank.  But I do remember one man’s eyes whom I met, who was a boy when he was released from a concentration camp, his parents both dead.  He was a nice man, very pleasant, and still young, and when I was introduced and shook his hand I smiled and looked into his eyes.    Normally the eyes look back at you, but his eyes seemed to go back forever and I had to stop looking before I lost my balance.  There seemed to be nothing there.  Still he was nice enough, and had survived. 

We all have a little bit of that feeling behind our eyes these days.  The grief and shock has taken us away and we don’t know how to come back.  So much of the world has been in this state for so long, but we haven’t known it.  Prisons in Siberia, China, Alcatraz, Soledad, where every day is or was a day of death and torture.    So much of this world is in a constant state of suffering.  10 year olds in Guatemala working 12 hours a day for 10 cents a day.  I’m told ‘they’re happy to get the work’.  Really?  I didn’t know that!   Thanks for letting me know.  They’re happy to get the work.  12 -year-old prostitutes in Thailand and Brazil.  Perhaps they’re happy to get the work too…

Now our walls are down and we know the potential for suffering that we all share as human beings .  Americans have taken their place in the world, a world that is not always easy to experience.  And so those of us who create drama for a living pause for a second to try to catch our breath and reflect on being human in the face of this all-too-real drama, pause to reflect on being American, and being in a communal state of grief.  And when we can, we’ll pick up our scripts, our bodies and our props, and try to make sense out of senseless death and hatred. We’ll probably consult the Greek Tragedies as we have before to find the deepest expression of grief and horror, and we’ll try to do justice to those voices that sing of our communal pain.

And unfortunately now, the great Tragedies will be a little easier to understand, and a little easier to express.

© 2001 Robert Epstein

Robert Epstein is the Program Director
and Instructor of The Complete
Meisner-Based Actor's Training in
Washington, D.C

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Winter 2001