A civic ritual I keep returning to

+ come hang with Bryan Doerries as we breakdown Theater of War Productions TODAY at noon EST

Two Mondays ago, I sat in a packed opera house in Brooklyn with roughly 2,000 fellow New Yorkers, listening to a sermon that was written and delivered by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, just two months before he was assassinated. On this particular evening, the sermon was being used as a shared, communal text to reflect on the events unfolding in America in 2026. For 90 riveting minutes, New Yorkers sat on the edge of their seats as our newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and our Attorney General, Letitia James, Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams, and Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, and the actor, Jeffrey Wright, all delivered together, sitting on plastic chairs in a semi-circle onstage, The Drum Major’s Instinct.

We had been gathered to participate in a rowdy, moving, and collective civic ritual dreamed up by the director-facilitator Bryan Doerries.

I first learned about Doerries’ work more than a decade ago, when I was conducting research for my book, The Art of Gathering. I was told about the innovative work he was doing to create public rituals with veterans and soldiers and communities affected by war to process suffering and tragedy together. While studying Greek, Latin and Hebrew as an undergraduate at Kenyon College, he learned that Greek plays (even though they were very much read as texts in the classroom) were never meant to be read. They were social technologies. They were meant to be enacted and processed in community with an audience. As he writes in his book, The Theater of War, “Tragedies don’t mean anything. They do something.” He continues: “I believe we must experience them in order to understand them, because tragedy is less a literary form than a blueprint for a felt experience.”

Greek tragedies were a social tool meant to be performed and received live, meant to do something in the room to the people experiencing it. The plays, about the slaughter of war, were performed for soldiers returning home from just that in ancient Athens. The citizen soldiers would cry together, grieve together, and recognize the horror of what they had lived through – together. The plays were doing something to and for the community. They were a collective tool.

Part of being a GROUP LIFER is beginning to just be aware and cognizant of when you are noticing, witnessing, experiencing, or even hearing about a collective tool. A collective tool is a tool that allows an individual to participate in something greater than themselves. And there are many many many collective tools in our midst.

Over the past 18 years, Doerries and his team, Theater of War Productions, have created more than 30 community-driven projects bringing relevant ancient texts to communities in crisis, and creating performances to interpret together and relate them to the most difficult questions of our time. He has partnered with families and community members directly affected by police violence (Antigone in Ferguson). Their project, End of Life, stages Greek plays in public communities and in medical settings as a catalyst for facilitated discussions about challenges faced by patients, families, and health professionals today around end of life care. They have used Oedipus the King, first performed in 429 BC just after a plague that killed a third of the Athenian population, to bring to communities affected by climate disaster, ecological disaster, and healing conversations after COVID-19.

In every performance acclaimed actors first read scenes from the chosen text, then a community panelist reflects back to the audience, and then a trained facilitator (often Doerries and a member from the affected community) turns to the audience for the bigger part of the play: their collective, live, out loud interpretation of the text. (This is not a talk back – a term Doerries tells me they “consider an obscenity.”)

Doerries cleverly assigned different public officials different lines that resonated with our modern national moment. When Mayor Mamdani reads King’s words referring to Jesus (“He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker. They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience; he broke injunctions”) the crowd goes wild.

Then Doerries turned to the audience and informed us that we are Act Two, and asked what he asks audiences all over the world: What in this ancient text resonated with you today?

Doerries is deeply clear about which community needs which intervention.

At its core, the work reflects a few simple ideas:

• He creates a temporary sacred text around which a diverse community can temporarily share. Doerries selects texts he believes will be relevant to a particular community, and after the actors perform, he grounds the community and discussion in the text and always asks the same question: what in this text resonated for you? In doing so, he creates a temporary shared text that allows a disparate group of people to have a common conversation.

• He centers the most impacted. He knows what each gathering is for and who it is for, and he invites those most affected by a crisis to be in community with one another. It is a tight social contract, shaped by generous exclusion, so that the people who need the work can receive it.

• He understands that leadership and democracy are not the same thing. He leads the room with a strong hand. He is facilitating the group dialogue, but he also has more flexibility than I’ve ever seen to allow people to go on and on. And smiles and says firmly, “This, too, is what democracy looks like.”

• He knows what to distribute to expertise and what to make democratic. From who reads the text to how the space is opened and closed, Doerries exercises real discernment about what should be democratic and what should be expert. “If we were to describe the invite to the audience, it’s to ‘interpret’ the story. We believe the audience knows more than we do and that there are infinite possibilities for interpretation in every audience/room,” he says.

I asked Doerries to explain to me what this performance is about, and he said this: “We are not asking audience members to agree with each other; we are asking them to agree to listen to each other’s interpretation of a story.”

I am thrilled that Doerries is joining us TODAY at NOON on Substack Live for my series THE BREAKDOWN to share in detail how he facilitates these gatherings, and what we can learn from this type of deep group intelligence. (To join our conversation, click here. You can join from your desktop or the Substack app.)

I would love to hear what you are seeing. Where are you noticing art, gathering, or collective practices helping people come together right now?

As always,

Priya

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Upcoming sessions:

• On February 18 at noon ET, I’m hosting a Group Help session called The Introvert’s Guide to Hosting Meaningful Gatherings. When I was researching The Art of Gathering, I was surprised by how many spectacular hosts told me they were introverts and that they prefer to stay out of the spotlight, have lower social batteries, or often feel on the outside of things. I asked one why she hosted so well, and she said: “I’m uncomfortable at most gatherings I go to. So I create the gatherings I wish existed in the world. And others seem to like them, too.” In this session, I’ll teach what I call the shy host’s guide to designing for everyone, and why social overwhelm may actually be a superpower. This one is just for Group Lifers (paid subscribers). RSVP here.

• On February 19 at noon ET, I’m going live on Substack for a BREAKDOWN with Veronica Chan and Evan Toretto Li about how mahjong has taken on a unique civic role. I noticed that a local Chinese restaurant had started hosting mahjong afternoons for regulars, and commented that it was a brilliant use of their space. That experiment grew into something people wanted to return to, and then recreate themselves. We’ll talk about how it works, why it stuck, and how the choices they made can translate to hosting, ritual, or rethinking how spaces hold group life. This conversation is open and free to everyone, and paid subscribers will receive the replay. RSVP here.