It wasn’t hard to sell. She responded to Doerries via email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That is a dream come true!” he remembered her writing.
“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood later said on a phone call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood – you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand…and on the other.'”
The actors, both professional and non-professional, won’t be wearing any costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) – except Atwood, who is the only one who needs an indication that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she considered a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.
The talk, which will be conducted virtually and the first in a year-long initiative of 12 performances in partnership with various nursing organizations across the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It is a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are leaving their jobs en masse. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their position because of their experiences during the pandemic.
“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everyone was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a clinical ethics leader who teaches at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries with recruiting nurses for the play. “But when time goes by and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has arisen in response to the pandemic, nurses – as the people closest to the patient – are the recipients of that anger or that violence and frustration.”
Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to bring community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals, and other venues to help, process and share active military and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers. . In the 14 years since its inception, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, prisoners and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disasters or racial violence.