All That You've Seen Here Is God

These four new translations of plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus were specifically written by Bryan Doerries for his critically acclaimed Beyond the Wire productions which have played to tens of thousands of soldiers, prisoners and medical personnel around the world. These translations are striking for their immediacy and gut-wrenching impact--truly bringing to life these centuries' old plays. Ajax depicts the abrupt and precipitous mental disintegration of the strongest Greek warrior during the final year of the Trojan War. Prometheus Bound is a play about a god who is sentenced by Zeus to solitary confinement, chained to a cliff at the end of the earth, for giving fire to mortals. Prometheus spends the entire play attempting to provoke an immoral response in his captors, in order to prove his moral superiority to them. Prometheus succeeds when, at the end of the play, he is buried alive in an avalanche of rocks. Women of Trachis, a play in which a terminally ill father asks his son to end his life, begging him to be his "doctor." The play Philoctetes is about a man who is abandoned by his friends for nine long years on a desolate island after contracting a mysterious and debilitating illness.