Right, they’re just human emotions.

Right, they’re just human emotions.
These are human emotions. They’re things all of us feel. So more than anything, what I want to do with this event, is I want to make these hidden wounds of war accessible, not only to a general population, not only to the people who are coming to the event but also to the people who have fought in these wars, because a lot of them don’t have the language to articulate what they’re feeling or even what they’re not feeling. A lot of the men and women who we treat just don’t feel anything anymore. But how many of us have had a broken heart? And when you have a broken heart, you get involved in the next relationship and you’re less inclined to love, you’re less inclined to feel, you’re more cautious. We’ve all felt that—we’re protecting ourselves. So when a guy or girl comes in and says, 'I feel real detached, like I can’t connect to anybody,' it’s like well, no shit. You’ve suffered a traumatic amount of grief, of course you’re less inclined to connect with somebody. So that’s what we really want to convey through Words of War, and we want to show through the performance, through Jake [Gyllenhaal]’s reading of a few poems that date back centuries, through Adam [Driver] and Joanne [Tucker]’s performance of the Geek tragedy, which dates back 3500 years ago, Ajax, is that there’s nothing new to this; that these are timeless experiences, and it’s normal human emotions under extraordinary circumstances. [Photo via]
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