Theater has existed ever since men and women first sat down to tell each other stories. By orchestrating speech, gesture, music and design, a director is tasked with the creation of a representative universe with which viewers can engage and identify. While some directors follow their artistic vision, others with careers in theater recognize the opportunities for therapy in the art form.

Over the past four months, theater director Bryan Doerries has taken his performances of Sophocles' classics Ajax and Philoctetes to military bases across the country. The director notes that the chosen plays center on "the need to find a way to bring veterans back to civilian life," The New Yorker reports.

The title characters of the plays help the veterans in the audience to understand their own feelings of isolation, indignation and rage, said Michael Kramer, director of the Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Program. Philoctetes is a soldier who is abandoned on a remote island after his fellow fighters are unable to cure his wounds, and Ajax is a warrior driven mad by rage.

Doerries told the news source that staging the plays to military audiences was a "complete revelation."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of actors, producers and directors is expected to rise by about 11 percent in the decade leading up to 2016.