Structure and Genre in Theater Therapy
William Gillespie
After the audience observes (with relief) that the production is too tight and fast-paced to include any audience participation, they realize that there is no single narrative to follow. The shape of the performance—the group therapy session—is the strongest continuity. The second strongest continuity is the fact that there are four performers (who play many roles) who (with one exception) never leave the audience's sight. The third and most important continuity is the subject matter and the thoroughness with which it is investigated. It is a play about the language of psychoanalytic therapy and how it is used in therapy, the presidential election of 1992, business, the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The play does have stories and characters (a few that recur) but most of its continuity lies elsewhere.
The absence of a single narrative brings up urgent questions. How can the play have a dramatic shape such that it builds up to a climax and resolution? Are the scenes disjointed? Does the variety eventually become boring? How is it possible for an audience to relate to a play that isn't about characters? It might seem as though a play which thwarts normal expectations from the outset would fail to have any dramatic shape because the audience cannot be surprised by anything that happens unless they are anticipating something else. Nevertheless, Theater Therapy has both continuity and a dramatic shape without the use of a single unifying narrative.
Although the scenes lack the continuity of consistent characters, they are visually continuous. Most of the scene changes are instantaneous: there are no costume or lighting or set changes. Instead, the performers snap from one character to another, taking care to differentiate them in their voices, movements, and tempo. When a scene is performed in the center of the circle instead of on the edge, the performers can roll out in their chairs without even standing up. With few exceptions, all four performers are visible and involved in the scene.
While it is performed with no intermission, there are five returns to the first line spoken in the group therapy session. These returns divide the play into five parts. Four of the parts contain a second unifying element: a scene enacting the same newspaper article (Associated Press—Indianapolis, July 19, 1992). There are two other scenes which recur: the Mom of the “Mom and Kid” scene returns four times in very different scenes. In addition, the audience is shown the Drive-Thru Therapy Clinic from outside and then from within: the point of view of the customer then the employee. All of these recurring scenes are distorted from the original each time they recur. Their continuity relies on a few recognizable aspects: the text of the same newspaper article, the same performer in the same wig and bathrobe playing the Mom, or the same interactions spoken between customer and Drive-Thru window worker. In this way, the audience's ability and desire to see recurring characters and themes is addressed, despite the play's apparent effort to confuse.
Just as Theater Therapy manages to thwart the expectations of an audience expecting a conventional play, it manages to thwart even the expectations it establishes. Paradoxically, the recurring characters are a surprise. The expectations of a normal theater audience are inverted such that normal theatrical conventions—staging a scene in front of the audience, staging a scene that the audience is witnessing rather than present at, use of consistent characters—become unusual.
The play achieves a climax of dramatic action by introducing more lighting effects, sound effects and music, and costuming as it progresses. It also draws connections between psychoanalysis and increasingly distant domains. The first of the five parts stays within the framework of a therapy session until the fifth scene, which is performed in the center and does not involve a therapy session. The second part takes therapeutic language farther from the therapy session with a scene called “Music Therapy,” where a piece by Mendelssohn is psychoanalyzed with numerous puns connecting music theory and psychology. The second part ends with three of the performers moving their swivel chairs around as though they are driving cars, lining up to explain their dreams to a speaker outside a Drive-Thru Therapy Clinic. Here the play achieves a comic high point. After this scene, particularly with the return to it in “Drive Thru II,” the comedy becomes darker. The third part of the play has brief returns to the group therapy session only at the very beginning and end, so the play is reaching a climax of discontinuity while, at the same time, two more scenes involving the character of the Mom and the second Drive-Thru scene provide a new continuity. In part four, in the scene called “The Family Must be Reunited at all Costs,” the group therapy session becomes a game show in which the Mom is reunited with her rapist husband and dead daughter. This scene is one of the most comical but perhaps the most horrifying as well. Then the last return to the newspaper article is performed by the game show host, as he sets a dollar bill on fire and puts it into a jar. At this moment there is a blackout—the first since the beginning of the play—so the audience can watch the dollar bill burn. This blackout marks the climax of technical theatrical effects, as the final scene, which follows it, involves two cassette players with dense sound effects. The play relies on very few sound or lighting effects whatsoever—but they are clustered near the end. The cassette players, incidentally, are visible and inexpensive. The final scene, “Let's Get Started V: Outdoor Ball-Fixated Competition Disorder,” applies the language of therapy to sports as two sports announcers analyze the football-like game below them. More than the previous scenes, this scene is applying the language of therapy someplace it normally doesn't go. This fact, along with obviously nonsensical texts (a parody of Deleuze and Guattari), gives the play a final absurdity. The metaphor has been overextended and no traces of the original continuities remain. At the end, the football game pivots without warning into the Democratic National Convention. The last words in the play are “...and we'll be right back.” Blackout.
The play requires no special lighting and all the effects are primitive. There is a flashlight, two cassette players, a microphone and amplifier, and a burning dollar bill. The props and costumes are similarly minimal. While this decision arose out of practical considerations, it is effective in distancing the audience from the performance. The sound effects are clearly not being used to fool anyone, merely as a necessary element of a scene. The low-tech nature of the production is also more in keeping with the atmosphere of an actual group therapy session.
While the play is written to stand apart from traditional theater, it can be thought of as a comedy. As a comedy, it is dark and satirical, and, by the final scene, absurdist and surreal. Because the scenes, while different, are all about therapeutic language applied to different domains, the scenes do manage to add up to something which resembles a critical argument more than a story. The critical argument—the thesis of the play—can be paraphrased: therapy and therapeutic language function to make a variety of social problems seem like personal problems that can be cured internally. In other words, there are a great many reasons for feeling sick or depressed in the world other than clinical disorders.
The nature of Theater Therapy demands that its performers have a certain versatility. One of the parts requires that the actor perform the character of Mom in a dance involving scissors and a family photo album. A different part requires that the performer execute a mime routine. The dance and mime routine were worked out by the original writers and performers and neither have been formally notated. Therefore the performers playing these roles should be skilled at movement or dance. The part of “William,” which includes the character of Mom may be played by a woman or a man, and a female impersonation need not be convincing. It is a scene which provokes nervous uncertain laughter, and an unconvincing female impersonation can assist this. However, to have this part played by an unconvincing female impersonator if there are female performers playing other parts is inadvisable. A female impersonator should not stand in for and mock womanhood, but rather alienate the audience from the scene, preventing the scene from being too convincing. Therefore, the performers should be selected based on their ability to play different roles convincingly without costume changes. Some consideration should be given to their dance or movement experience and the fact that one of the performers must play a female character.
It is not acceptable to use more than four performers to play the four parts. The audience must be given continuties to make up for the discontinuities in the narrative. If there are only four performers who are introduced at the very beginning and who appear in most scenes, it will be easier for the audience to follow the play's many shifts.
Because the majority of the characters appear only once, their personalities are not explored in detail. Most, however, are recognizable types. The characters at the various scenes modelled after group therapy sessions are nervous and soft-spoken. The exception is the scene called “Tone of Voice,” in which one of the session participants is admonished by the others for being too assertive. They whisper admonishments to him more and more quietly until they are inaudible. In the scene called “Teacher,” the participants continue a subdued and passive speaking style even though they are describing their experiences threatening a schoolteacher and driving her out of town for teaching subversive material to their children: “You know what she said? She said Christopher Columbus didn't discover America, it used to belong to (scoff) INDIANS. Is that something to tell five-year-olds?” The scene called “Voter Therapy” requires the performance of the narrator of a self-help tape. This is slightly different from the voice of someone who is in the room. In the scene called “Dollar Bill Story,” the therapy session becomes more of a story circle. In this case, the person relating their childhood memories assumes the role of a storyteller addressing children, confident and animated. In “Applause Therapy,” group therapy session participants slip out of character to loudly applaud one of participants to make him feel better about himself. Finally, in “The Family Must be Reunited at all Costs,” the group therapy session has become a game show with the leader as host. Thus, the form of the group therapy session recurs throughout the play while undergoing various permutations.
The character called Don returns played by two of the performers (one of whom is using the loudspeaker from “Drive Thru 1”). This character's lines are always the same and should be presented identically each time. He says: “Okay, let's get started. In case you don't remember, my name is Don and I'll be your group therapy leader for the next eight weeks. This is our third session already, but as you can see we have some latecomers, so maybe if the three of you could introduce yourselves so we know who you are...” Each time the three others introduce themselves, they are different characters. This is the script's most obvious continuity and serves the function of outlining the play's five parts.
Other characters unrelated to psychology who appear briefly and need to be established quickly include Gulf War veterans giving reports on ailments the returned from the war with; employees of a Drive-Thru, who include two disgruntled employees, one arrogant employee, and an angry manager; three zealous entrepreneurial contractors;
A few of the characters appear more than once and develop, albeit abruptly. These are the moments when consideration can be given to the thematic ethics of their development. The performance of the Mom changes in each of her four appearances. She is, in the “Mom and Kid” scene, troubled. In the Scissor Dance, “Mom and Photo Album,” her movements express a graceful freedom which descends into savage anxiety, as she opens her family album, becomes distraught, and begins to hack away at it with scissors. The she snaps into the scene called “Family at War,” in which, with the same costume and an entirely different set of mannerisms, the Mom becomes a gruff military commander and declares war on the Johnson family next door. Finally, she appears as a ragged, unwilling, and terrified participant in a game show. This is not character development. The character (the costume) and what it represents (family) is being used as a continuity to show comparisons between different situations. The Mom's husband returned from Vietnam a rapist (“I saw in his eyes the same terror and loathing he must have felt for the Vietnamese women he raped with other American soldiers obeying blind pack training”). War has ruined the family. When, as a logical extension of family values, she is reunited with her husband, it is clear how social pressures are contributing to her emotional breakdown. This is the message the performer who plays Mom must convey. This cannot be accomplished through conventional character acting. Instead, the performer must maintain some aspects of their performance of Mom while abruptly changing others. In this role, more than any of the others in the play, it is important to perform to demonstrate rather than convince. Although the story the Mom recounts is tragic, the audience is not to feel sympathy for her but to study her situation. Brecht proposed the Alienation Effect to “make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident” (136). Brecht suggests underacting: “The actor should refrain from living himself into the part prematurely in any way, and should go on functioning as long as possible a reader...” (137). This is good advice for the performer who plays the Mom.
The story she tells, in which her husband returned from fighting in the Vietnam War “unable to adapt to civilian life,” raped her and their daughter (who later committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills), is an actual case study adapted from the book The Courage to Heal by Laura Davis and Ellen Bass. The book is a detailed guide for female survivors of childhood sexual abuse—usually incest. Their writing is clear and candid. The recovery process often involves reclaiming blocked memories.
“One of the most powerful and effective ways children survive abuse is to block it out, to push the awareness of the experience away. Children actually forget the abuse happened; they store it away in a part of themselves that isn't available to their conscious minds. This isn't universally true; many children never forget what happened to them. But many survivors grow to adulthood with no memory of the abuse.” (Davis, 115)
In the “Mom and Kid” scene, the Kid asks the Mom innocent questions about people in the family album. To each of four questions, the Mom replies in four different ways, each time further obscuring the truth by phrasing it in vague psychological language. The scene is intended to show how war can psychologically damage soldiers and their families, and how families can be complicit in repressing important memories by not admitting that a rape has happened. The Mom, particularly as performed by a man, is a stereotype of a hysterical woman. This is an image of woman recognizable to all and, as Shashana Felman writes, rooted in the language:
“Is it by chance that hysteria (significantly derived, as is well known, from the Greek word for “uterus”) was originally conceived as an exclusively female complaint, as the lot and prerogative of women? And is it by chance that even today, between women and madness, sociological statistics established a privileged relation and a definite correlation?” (6)
As soon as she begins to tell her stories, the audience realizes that, given what has happened to her, this hysterical woman is actually quite strong and calm. It is the men in her life who have been insane. The scene begins with the Mom explaining to her son how he lost his father and sister in alarming detail, and ends with her telling the same story with the father and sister experiencing “personal difficulties” and dying in “unfortunate accidents.” The audience is able to tell that the same conversation is being repeated four times anew, each time with less detail, because the performers quickly roll in their swivel chairs to a new position each time the Kid repeats his question.
Freud observed the phenomenon of the repressed childhood memory:
“I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives--and fail to find in it a strange riddle.” (Basic Writings, 64)
One of Freud's cases, a patient known to history as “The Wolf Man” who suffered from dreams of wolves outside his bedroom window, is referred to in the scenes called “Drive Thru 1” and “Drive Thru 2.” A customer drives up to the window and shouts into the speaker: “I had a dream where there were these wolves sitting in a tree outside my bedroom window.” Julia Kristeva's description of the Wolf Man is perhaps the most haunting:
“Was it all a dream? Or a nightmare? What was the pain in the pit of his stomach that woke him in the middle of the night, when the howling began and savage eyes bored through the curtain right into his innards, like red-hot leeches just below his heart.” (Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves 4)
Freud reasoned that the Wolf Man's dream was a result of witnessing his parents having sex at an early age. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to the Wolf Man in A Thousand Plateaus. In a critique of Freud's reasoning, they write
“Who was Freud trying to fool? The wolves never had a chance to get away to save their pack: it was already decided from the very beginning that animals could only serve to represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents. Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves and their silent call, the call to become-wolf.” (28)
Deleuze and Guattari here accuse Freud of overlooking interesting alternatives when relying on sexuality as an explanation for every dream. A Thousand Plateaus was one of the texts used in writing the play. Like the manner in which Freud is referred to, the treatment of Deleuze and Guattari is not entirely respectful. A text which began as a satire of the extravagantly metaphorical style used in A Thousand Plateaus is spoken in fragments by a sports announcer during the final scene: “Let's Get Started V: Outdoor Ball-Fixated Competition Disorder.” There are two announcers using psychological language to describe a sporting event similar to football, and, of the two, the “color person” (the announcer who is speculative while the other is focused on the game below) speaks the derived text:
“That's no surprise, but it's just more stress for the Compulsions, and two affirmations for the Priorities' half-goalie Chuck Migraine, points that may increase his self-esteem after some of the emotional wounds he's received this season. And indeed Bob, the tails of the wolf pack become erect, flickering like a field of furry father phalli. And I can't help but wonder, Bob, who could resist the urge to become one with such a pack. Peel back foil to expose tater tots.”
Although the play refers to Freud, it is not Freudian. The play is not about real psychological illness—disorders arising from medical conditions rather than trauma. Freudian psychoanalysis is shown to be a fashion statement in the scene called “Let's Call him Bob,” in which a psychoanalysis patient returns to his analyst's couch with a new description of his anxieties between sessions spent bathing and dressing in front of a mirror. This scene is to demonstrate that some people choose neuroses to present to the world, and others only have psychological disorders because they can afford to be diagnosed by a psychologist. Perhaps Kristeva puts it the most succinctly: “Unfortunately, psychoanalysis has been unable to escape the mass media; it has become something of a fashion.” (In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, 2) The scene “Let's Call him Bob” also demonstrates one of the primary ideas behind the play: psychological language is used to make people feel more comfortable with personal and social problems, rather than solve them. Thus, it is not the intention of the play to present Freudian psychoanalysis in a respectful fashion.
Theater Therapy was written in 1992, and has many references specific to that year: the presidential election, the War in the Persian Gulf, and the L.A. riots, for example. The play has aged strangely, and the news stories it is written around have become relevant again and again. It now presents the audience with American history they still remember. It is not didactic, but it does have a political message.
The fact that the play is intended to provoke as it entertains does not make it unsuitable for a performance at Steppenwolf. In the words of Brecht: “Here is a new and quite specific kind of learning, and it can no longer be reconciled with a specific old kind of entertainment.” (132) Theater Therapy is experimental theater that succeeded.
Works Cited
Brecht, Bertholt. Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
Davis, Laura. Allies in Healing. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guttari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy.” Feminisms. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Random House, 1938.
Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans: Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Kristeva, Julia. The Old Man and the Wolves. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.