Who: Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, Bill Camp, Marjolaine Goldsmith, Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, Craig Manbauman, Bryan Doerries
What: Live dramatic reading and discussion from Theater of War Productions
Where: FDR Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island
When: Wednesday, September 27, free with RSVP, 5:00
Why: On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his annual speech to Congress, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
That quote is embedded in s block of marble in FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. On September 27 at 5:00, Theater of War will present its latest production, performing scenes from Sophocles’s Ajax, a fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy about the warrior who played a key role in Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War. The event is free; audiences can watch the show in the park or virtually as a Zoom webinar. The impressive cast features actors Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, and Bill Camp, company manager Marjolaine Goldsmith, and retired military veterans Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, and Craig Manbauman, with Theater of War artistic director and translator Bryan Doerries serving as facilitator of a panel discussion and open dialogue exploring the physical and psychological wounds of war on individuals, families, and the community.
“I pity him in his misery for all that he is my foe, because he is bound fast to a dread doom,” Ajax says in the play. “I think of my own lot no less than his. For I see that we are phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows.”