In honor of Veterans Day, below is a list of ten works of theater depicting military veterans, ranging from Ancient Greek tragedies and Shakespearean history plays to Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Off-Broadway trilogy and a pair of Broadway musicals. Veterans Day is a national holiday every November 11th, because that was the date in 1918 — to be precise, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of that year — when the armistice was signed that ended World War I. Armistice Day was celebrated until 1954, when Congress renamed it Veterans Day, intended to honor all U.S. military veterans.

There are many works of art and entertainment about active-duty soldiers, in boot camp and combat. The stage works below are mostly about life afterward — although, as some drive home, “afterward” is a concept that many veterans struggle to achieve.

Ajax and Philoctetes 

“Ajax,” one of the seven existing tragedies written by Sophocles some three thousand years ago, revolves around the resentment that the warrior Ajax feels when the Greek army does not honor him with the armor of Achilles after the hero of the Trojan War is killed in combat – a resentment that drives Ajax first homicidal and then suicidal.

“Philoctetes” is another tragedy by Sophocles, about a master archer who is wounded by a snake bite on his way to the Trojan War, and so is left on a desert island for nine years – until he is needed again.

Both plays are regularly given starry staged readings by Theater of War Productions, founded by Bryan Doerries, a company that uses the tragedies from Ancient Greek to help military veterans and other specific audiences grapple with trauma. As he explains in  his book, The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today ,  “Ancient Greek drama was a form of storytelling, communal therapy, and ritual reintegration for combat veterans by combat veterans. Sophocles himself was a general. At the time Aeschylus wrote and produced his famous Oresteia, Athens was at war on six fronts. The audiences for whom these plays were performed were undoubtedly composed of citizen-soldiers. Also, the performers themselves were most likely veterans or cadets. Seen through this lens, ancient Greek drama appears to have been an elaborate ritual aimed at helping combat veterans return to civilian life after deployments during a century that saw 80 years of war.

“Plays like Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes read like textbook descriptions of wounded warriors, struggling under the weight of psychological and physical injuries to maintain their dignity, identity, and honor. Given this context, it seemed natural that military audiences today might have something to teach us about the impulses behind these ancient stories.”

Henry IV, part 2 and Coriolanus

Several of Shakespeare’s plays feature military veterans prominently; I pick these two because of how they are discussed in an excellent nine-part series in HowlRound by Stephan Wolfert, entitled Shakespeare Through the Lens of a Military Veteran. 

In “Henry IV, part 2,” Lady Percy addresses her husband Hotspur with what is a textbook case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to an analysis by Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist with the Department of Veteran Affairs, in his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character as cited in Wolfert’s essay Faint Slumbers

O my good lord, why are you thus alone? (1)
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry’s bed? (2)
Tell me, sweet lord, what is ’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure (3), and thy golden sleep? (4)
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth (5)
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks (6)
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy? (7)
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched (8),
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry “Courage! To the field!” And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep(9),
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream (10)

• 1. Social withdrawal and isolation
• 2. Random, unwarranted rage at family, sexual dysfunction, no capacity for intimacy
• 3. Loss of appetite, somatic disturbances (peripheral nervous system connected to the skin sensory organs and all skeletal muscles), loss of ability to experience pleasure
• 4. Insomnia
• 5. Depression
• 6. Peripheral vasoconstriction, autonomic hyperactivity
• 7. Sense of the dead being more real than the living, depression
• 8. Fragmented vigilant sleep
• 9. Traumatic dreams, reliving episodes of combat, fragmented sleep
• 10. Night sweats, autonomic hyperactivity

“Coriolanus,” written ten years later “elucidates the difficulty of reintegration back into society for our veterans who’ve served multiple tours in heavy combat,” as Wolfert writes in A Common Cry of Curs. Unable to adjust, he has been banished by the citizens of Rome, prompting his famous, bitter retort:

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you
And here remain with your uncertainty!
…Thus I turn my back.
There is a world elsewhere. 

All My Sons

In this play by Arthur Miller first produced on Broadway in 1947, Joe and Kate Keller have lost one son in World War II, Larry. The younger son, Chris has survived, but feels guilty for having done so. As the play unfolds, we learn that Joe owns a factory that accidentally manufactured faulty airline parts but covered up the cracks and shipped them off anyway, resulting in the death of 21 pilots.
The modern-day tragedy was revived three times on Broadway, most recently in 2019 starring Annette Bening and Tracy Letts

Sticks and Bones 

David, the son of a Middle American couple named Ozzie and Harriet comes home from the Vietnam War blind and traumatized in David Rabe black comedy, written during the Vietnam War that won the Tony Award for best play when it was produced in 1972.  It was revived Off-Broadway in 2014 with a starry cast including Richard Chamberlain and Holly Hunter.
 “Sticks and Bones” was one of a trio of war plays by Rabe, a Vietnam War veteran himself,  which included “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel”  and “Streamers,” both of which focus on soldiers rather than veterans.

Fifth of July

The play by Lanford Wilson is set in a farmhouse in rural Missouri owned byKenneth Tally Jr., a legless Vietnam veteran, and his lover, Jed, a horticulturist. They are hosts to a reunion of old friends, including Ken’s sister, June, The play explores their loss of youthful idealism and growing resentment following the Vietnam War, nominated Broadway production opened in 1980 starring Christopher Reeve, Jeff Daniels and Swoozie Kurtz. It ran for more than 500 performances and featured a half dozen other Kenneth Tally Jrs, including Richard Thomas and Michael O’Keefe.

The Elliot Trilogy

The Elliot Trilogy, written by Quiara Alegría Hudes’ (perhaps still best-known as the librettist and screenwriter for “In The Heights”), tells the story of Elliot Ortiz, marine veteran of the Iraq War who was wounded in more than one way: He walks with a limp; he also keeps on seeing the ghost of an Iraqi, who says the same sentence again and again, one Elliot cannot understand since he doesn’t know Arabic. In the first play in the trilogy “Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue,” Elliot learns the stories of his father and grandfather who served in Korea and Vietnam before him. The second, “Water by the Spoonful” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The final play, “The Happiest Song Plays Last,” finds  Elliot struggling to overcome the traumas of combat by taking on an entirely new and unexpected career: an action film hero being filmed in Jordan during the Arab Spring. Th actor Armando Riesco portrayed Elliot in productions of all three plays, including the 2013 Off-Broadway (and post-Pulitzer) premiere of Water by the Spoonful.

An American In Paris

This 2015 Broadway adaptation of the 1951 MGM movie musical uses the same Gershwin score and much the same plot of recently discharged American GIs trying to make art and a life in the City of Lights. But first-time Broadway director Christopher Wheeldon turned the show into a modern ballet (which won him a Tony Award for best choreography), and librettist Craig Lucas set the stage musical immediately after the war, rather than several years later as in the movie. This made the audience more conscious of the toll the war had taken on these characters. (The movie audience six decades earlier didn’t need to be made conscious of it; they had lived through it.)

Bandstand

In this musical by Robert Taylor and Richard Oberacker, a group of traumatized World War II veterans form a 40’s jazz band with a Gold Star widow as their singer. The show attempts to combine an original score of period music and exciting dance with an exploration of the toll that war takes on soldiers, not just in combat but once they return to civilian life.The 2017 Broadway production was led by Corey Cott and Laura Osnes,