Theater: A Healing Art

 

[I’m going to explore the notion that theater has the power to heal underma the right circumstances.  I’m not thinking of anything magical or supernatural, though perhaps spiritual in a secular sense, and almost certainly psychological.  I’m also not going to claim that all theatrical performances are healing events, or that all the ones that are, are intended to be.  

[The healing qualities of theater aren’t an alien concept.  The Aristotelian concept of catharsis, the cleansing that tragic drama brings about, is well known to even the most casual of theater students, for instance.  I recently read an essay about a modern production of an Indonesian wayang (shadow play) that was devised to heal the residents of Bali after the terrorist bombing there on 12 October 2002 disrupted the natural balance that is sought for in Balinese religion (I. Nyoman Sedana, “Theatre in a Time of Terrorism: Renewing Natural Harmony after the Bali Bombing via Wayang Kontemporer,” Asian Theatre Journal [Univ. of Hawai’i Press] 22.1 (Spring 2005): 73-86).

[I’ll be confining myself here to performances in the United States with reference to American drama and theater.  You can be sure, however, that the same concepts and principals operate in all Western theater and almost certainly in non-Western theater as well.]

Last 10 July, I posted a collection of articles on Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, a play by former U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Scott Mann about combat service in Afghanistan and its effects on the GI’s and their families.  In a 7 July interview with Mann on CNN News Central, Jim Sciutto, chief national security correspondent and a co-anchor of News Central, Mann labeled the play and its production “a very, very healing program of storytelling and shared experience.” 

In “Retired Green Beret Scott Mann Examines ‘Holistic Horror Of War’ In ‘Last Out’” by Brian McElhiney in the Stars and Stripes of 2 July 2023, Gary Sinise, whose charitable foundation subsidized a national tour of Last Out, said of the 1980 play Tracers, a progenitor of Mann’s play by and about Vietnam vets, that “The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”

In a 1992 interview, Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director about whom I’ve written many times now in Rick On Theater, pronounced, “[I] see theater not as a secular entertainment but as some kind of healing ceremony . . .” and later wrote, “The theatre is a healing art.”

What do they mean by “healing theater”?  How is theater a “healing art”?  To begin with, none of these people is alluding to psychodrama, the psychological therapy technique—with which healing theater bears some superficial similarities.

The principal differences between healing theater and psychodrama are significant, however.  First, we’re talking about a type of theater, not a type of therapy.  Healing theater happens in a theater (or some space that’s used as a theater) and it’s open to the public, whether paying or admission-free.  The performers may be professional actors or amateurs, but they’re usually rehearsed and follow a script or scenario with no more improvisation than any theatrical performance.

Second, psychodrama effects the participants, who are patients; but healing theater works on both the participants, from the writers and creators to the actors, crew, and production staff, and the spectators.

Shapiro wrote in 1993 that the Navajo sings, which he learned about as a boy at summer camp in Minnesota, became his “clearest model . . . for healing theatre.”  So, let me say a bit about the Navajo sings to which Shapiro likened theater’s healing properties (see “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” posted on Rick On Theater on 15 May 2013).

Many American Indian societies, including the Navajo Nation, don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony in society or the world.  This is then manifested in a person’s illness.  The healing rite requires repairing this environmental disorder.  The Navajo healing ceremony includes prayers, songs, sandpaintings, sweat baths, ritual bathing, face- and body-painting, and other ritual practices dedicated to accomplishing this. 

The healing chants, or songs, not only cure the patient, but also benefit the patient’s family, everyone else who attends the ceremony (that is, the audience), and the entire Navajo Nation.  The ceremony attracts spirits who return balance and harmony to the society or the world. 

Shapiro mounted Roadkill, a protest against the damage done by automobiles both to the city environment and to human bodies, in 1992.  It was the final event of the First Annual Eco-Festival whose text was by playwright Karen Malpede, and it was billed as “A street piece created as a healing ceremony.”

The idea kept cropping up throughout his career.  Of his company’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1988), the director characterized it as “an exorcism of our own damned cynicism, our own devils, our own false contracts”—clearly forms of societal discord.  (See my discussion of this production in “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016.)

Shapiro conceived 1989’s Strangers as a “healing ceremony which contains within it a narrative of destruction and mourning for the family [at the center of the narrative] as a vehicle of human culture and civilization.”  (I discuss this play in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014.)

I even think that a reason for the significance Shapiro placed on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which became the director’s last production in 1996, was connected to his notion of theater as a healing art. 

Seagull was extremely significant to Shapiro from his earliest days as a theater enthusiast—before he made it his life’s endeavor.  He expressly chose the Chekhov play for what he knew would be his final production.

Certainly the play deals with several of Shapiro’s career-long concerns—the place of the artist in society and the sacrifice of children, most pointedly—but hidden within the text is Konstantine Treplev’s statement (from Jean-Claude van Itallie’s 1973 translation):

Then, when Spirit and Matter merge harmoniously, become one—the reign of Universal Will shall begin. 

It also seems to me that one effect, perhaps serendipitous, of his work on the production was a tangible example of theater as a healing art.

Shapiro was dying of inoperable bladder cancer when he embarked on the production.  His prognosis when he was diagnosed in July 1995 was six months, but he lived for a yead-and-a-half—until Seagull was rehearsed, presented in Albuquerque (the home base of the young company staging the play), took the show to Baltimore (where Shapiro’s Shaliko Company premièred its first production in 1973), and returned to New Mexico.

The director was in considerable pain, which most observers could plainly see, but he persevered because, he said, “I’d rather do something beautiful than dwell on my symptoms.”  The artistic work couldn’t cure the cancer, he knew, but it could make the life he had left tolerable and even rewarding.  It could heal Shapiro’s spirit.

The healing chants of the Navajo Indians are also transformative, which is a characteristic that Shapiro also saw in modern western theater.  The sick person is transformed into a Holy Person by the performance and the society is simultaneously transformed.

Theatrical theorist Antonin Artaud also saw theater in this light: 

I shall seek out what has been preserved and is reappearing, the old mythical tradition of the theater in which the theater is regarded as a therapy, a way of healing comparable to certain dances of the Mexican Indians.

The Navajo healing ceremonials combine song, dance, and pantomime to make simple dramas.  The texts of the chants are long, epic passages about the legendary heroes and Holy People of the tribe.  The ritual songs and ceremonies comprise what the part-Cheyenne writer Frank Waters (1902-95; see “Frank Waters,” 4 May 2012), who focused on the Native American experience, called “myth-dramas,” a little like medieval European mystery or miracle plays, which are passed orally from one generation to the next to preserve the legends and traditional history of the tribe.

This is the connection Leonardo Shapiro saw between theater and the healing powers of Native American art.  And whether one sees this as a spiritual or psychological process, it’s the benefit that Scott Mann, Gary Sinise, and Shapiro, and many others, find in theatrical performances beyond either entertainment or edification.

On 2 and 5 September 2022, I blogged on The Last Cyclist, the reconstruction of a 1944 cabaret from the Terezin concentration camp.  I didn’t say so in my report, but I believe that this performance of Karel Švenk’s (1917-45) satire, was another example of theater as a healing art—and it accomplished this on two levels almost 80 years apart.

When Švenk (1917-45) wrote his cabarets, he often included one song, composed as the finale for his first Terezin cabaret, called the “Terezin March.”  It appeared in the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist because it “was so energizing and electrifying, it so captured the hopes of people living with a sense of numbing despair.”

As reported in my post “‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’” by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022), in the cabarets, “Life in the camp is treated lightly with a powerful sense of humour, rendering the play, as if it were, ‘a joyful resistance[.]’”  This was the healing effect of the cabarets for the concentration camp inmates and the cabaret performers.  It helped make it possible for the prisoners to persevere even under the horrendous circumstances of the camps.

At Terezin, Švenk had resolved “to strengthen and raise the morale of the prisoners.  Which he did, using laughter and satire as his most potent weapons.”  For 21st-century audiences of the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist, I think the effect is two-fold.

For the largely non-Jewish casts of the reconstruction productions, it was an inspiration to learn more about the Holocaust.  Adapter Naomi Patz and director Edward Einhorn attested that the participants were extremely moved by their involvement in The Last Cyclist.  Fighting anti-Semitism, which has grown in both frequency and intensity in recent years, depends greatly on consciousness-raising, especially among non-Jews. 

As we’ll hear with regard to Last Out and Tracers, the telling of the stories of peoples who have suffered is a way of relieving the pain and salving the wounds.  It works on those who do the telling and those who participate by hearing the telling, like the observers at the Indian healing ceremonies are returned to harmony just as the person sung over is. 

In the present-day performances of Cyclist, the audience in the house at the West End Theatre Off-Off-Broadway or the one at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the film play the part of the Terezin inmate spectators at the final dress rehearsal; the film’s viewers, by extension (assisted by the camera work), do so as well.  In the words of Neil Genzlinger, who reviewed the 2013 Off-Off-Broadway staging, this was “theater as a chance to bear witness.”  Jews and non-Jews in the audiences of Cyclist benefit from the healing forces of the story-telling. 

As Jennifer Farrar of the Associated Press put it:

. . . watching the crude but well-performed and affecting production that opened Thursday night at the West End Theater, one can’t help thinking about what it was like to actually be trapped in the horrific situation of the original performers and their fellow inmates in those rehearsal audiences.

Theater about immense tragedies like the Holocaust and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, about victims and sufferers like Jews imprisoned in death camps or soldiers who saw too much violence and death, aren’t the only healing experiences the art can provide.  After the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City, residents here suffered their own forms of PTSD.  The city closed down and many New Yorkers holed up at home, afraid to venture out.

As David Romàn remarked in his 2002 essay “Introduction: Tragedy” in Theatre Journal, “going to see a show was linked with ‘getting back to normal,’ as if theatregoing was a routine daily activity.”  The New York Times asked in its review of Urinetown, whose Broadway première, postponed a week, had been scheduled for the night the theaters reopened: “Can we laugh and thrill to a musical at a time like this? . . .  When every individual spirit as well as the national one can use all the bolstering it can get, “Urinetown” is not just a recommended tonic.” 

The answer is yes.  When Romàn saw Urinetown, he had this to say of the experience: “What was most interesting about the show was the readiness of its audience to enjoy the performance.” 

One Broadway performer, Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman, a dancer/choreographer and producer, a former Rockette, saw it this way:

Two nights after Sept. 11 and the terrorist attacks, Broadway reopened, and I returned to the theater to put my fears on hold, suit up in sequins and sing and dance the classic American backstage musical “42nd Street.”  I was worried that it was too soon and too disrespectful to go back to work.  Not to mention that I was still scared of the city and unsure about what was going on.  How could I smile at a time like this? 

When I got to the Ford Center for the Performing Arts [now the Lyric Theatre], I was comforted at the sight of all my co-workers – a sign of life as it was before Sept. 11.  There was an announcement that the families of the brave firefighters and police officers who had rushed to the World Trade Center had been invited to join us at the theater by the show’s producers.  It was overwhelming to realize that they would be our first audience since the tragic events of only two days before. Nerves were taut and tears were in everyone’s eyes.

Michael Cumpsty, one of the stars of the show, gave a short curtain speech thanking the audience for being there (about 900 people filled half the theater).  He said how grateful we were to share their company at such a time and that we hoped to relieve their minds for the next several hours.

The orchestra started and from behind the curtain, where the ensemble (including myself) was uncertainly waiting to begin, we could feel a sigh of relief from the audience.  It was as if the great sounds of the orchestra playing [original 1933 film score composer] Harry Warren’s music were calming and comforting the anxious people, promising them that their worries were in someone else’s hands for even a brief time.

When the curtain went up, the crowd let out an enormous burst of applause, more thunderous and heartfelt than on opening night.  It was so surprising that a group of us onstage started to cry.  But as I looked at the crowd, imagining their pa6.in and filled with my own, I felt a great desire to succeed, to take their minds off this unstable world for a short while and guide them into the world of theater.  That was what they wanted.

Suddenly, I realized, I was experiencing exactly what I had read about in textbooks.  The original 1933 movie version of “42nd Street” was a musical created to help raise the spirits of Americans during the Depression.  And it seemed extremely important to do the same that night.  I even understood the value of the American chorus girl. Sometimes, wearing patent-leather shoes and girlie costumes has made me feel frivolous.  But that night was not about what I might want to say as a woman.  It was about escaping reality.  About beauty, music and comedy.  And it worked.  The laughter that Thursday was so rewarding.  It was not disrespectful; it was necessary.

At the end of the show, we waved the American flag.  Hearing the applause, seeing the uplifted faces, the flag rippling in the air, was immensely moving.  What the audience was applauding was not our talents but our attempts to help in any way possible.  That this gave them some comfort made me very proud to be a performer.

Shusterman was describing for the New York Times the healing she felt as a performer, what she saw in her fellow cast members, and what she sensed from the spectators.  And 42nd Street isn’t an account of the event that had knocked all these people off balance.  What helped restore them to some measure of psychic harmony was the capacity of theater to form a community, even a temporary one. 

David Romàn had a similar experience, from the perspective of the theatergoer rather than the performer, when he saw The Full Monty.  He found that

what struck me most about the production was the sheer virtuosity of the performers—including the musicians in the pit—their professionalism, their sense of purpose in performing for us.  In the end, I too joined the standing ovation that was so effortlessly offered to the company by the full house.  I was very pleased to be in this audience and the next day’s Urinetown’s audience, even if the shows themselves weren’t completely satisfying or memorable.  Perhaps it didn’t really matter what show I was attending that weekend.  Most likely, I would have experienced the same feelings of audience connection and inflated enthusiasm at any show that hadn’t closed in the theatre district in the wake of September 11th.  These felt like little triumphs for all of us, a slight shift in the mood and tone of the city and its people.

Romàn defined the essence of his theater experience in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy by noting, “Liveness was at the core of these events.” 

The performing arts offered people the chance to be with other people and experience themselves together. In this sense, we were as much audiences for ourselves as we were for the performances.

As my friend Leonardo Shapiro characterized this phenomenon: “Culture is a story told around a fire.  It is the conversation between the young and old.  It is the fire on your face and the cold on your back.  The link between your experience and mine.”  

He was assuredly speaking of theater, as he pointed out, “Americans quite desperately need some place to gather around the fire and tell each other stories and their dreams. . . .  Theater is meant to be a place where you act out your dreams and fantasies . . . .”

In the American Theatre magazine of December 2002, Linda Frye Burnham, a writer who focuses on performance and community art, chronicles a communal theater project “to pull Union County [South Carolina] back from the brink of disintegration.”

The back story is that in 2000, Union County was in financial straits because of the collapse of the textile industry, leading businesses and schools to close as towns across the county faced bankruptcy, forcing young people to flee the area looking for work elsewhere, shrinking the local population. 

Not only that, but the town of Union, the county seat, was nationally notorious as the home of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children in 1994 by driving her car into the town lake.  She then invented the story that an unknown black man had taken her car and kidnapped the children, and the area had never recovered from the infamy of the murders and the racist lie Smith used to escape blame.

Seeking a solution for the county’s dire troubles, community leaders turned to a cultural project they’d seen work in Miller County, Georgia, nine years earlier: they engaged the Chicago-based Community Performance Inc. (now called Community Performance International) to help them develop a play based on the county’s history, culture, and, most importantly, its stories—some of them not told for centuries.

The project, entitled Turn the Washpot Down, involved the whole community—black and white, young and old, rich and poor—and the finished play was performed in the summer of 2002.  Said Jules Carriere, one of the CPI cowriters of the script, of the county residents, “They didn’t want to settle for sweetness.  They wanted to tell the hard stuff . . . .”

In the end, Burnham characterized Washpot as “an intimate theatre of place.  Its potent impact is derived from its truth, the resonance of shared ordeals and delights, its portrait of a place like no other.”  The editor of the local paper in Macon, Georgia, wrote of that county’s similar effort, that it was “a performance that is not only healing but also compelling, authoritative, confident theatre.”

Union County’s Washpot not only healed individual people—the participants, their fellow Union County citizens, spectators at the performances whether local or visitor—but it returned a community that was disintegrating back to harmony: the very definition of a healing ceremony.

As a conclusion to her report, Burnham wrote a perfect characterization of healing theater:

Once in a while in my travels, I see graffiti scrawled on a wall somewhere: “Art Saves Lives.”  I feel in my bones it is true.  Even if Turn the Washpot Down doesn’t save Union’s life, it has already saved its soul.

[The work of Community Performance Inc./Community Performance International as described by Linda Frye Burnham in her AT article (“A More Perfect Union,” December 2002) is truly interesting.  Her account of the development of Turn the Washpot Down is also fascinating.  I highly recommend looking into both.  (Unfortunately, the AT online archive doesn’t go back as far as 2002, so the issue isn’t available on the Internet.  A slightly different version of the article, however, is accessible at https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/21889.pdf; many libraries will have back issues of AT as well.)]