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I think that Amy Herzog is one of our most gifted contemporary playwrights. I first became aware of her when I saw 4000 Miles, which captures a profound attachment between a grandmother and grandson, crackling with intergenerational dynamics. With that evening's recommendation, I went to see The Great God Pan. Not only did I think it was a beautifully crafted play, but I thought that this is a text that captures the ambiguities of memory, the repetitions of trauma, the merging of individual dynamics in cocreated and knotted relationship patterns, and even embeds a psychotherapeutic re-enactment as part of its drama. The uncanny way that Herzog captures the fundamental clinical issues that one deals with as a couple's and family therapist made me feel that she had been a fly on the wall of my office, as well as a synapse in my brain for the last 30 years.
Section VIII of Division 39, Couples and Family Therapy and Psychoanalysis, had benefited from two earlier, stellar readings by the Red Well Theater Group of Washington DC, and I felt that Pan would be an excellent candidate for a staged reading as well.
Directed by Robert Schulte, who has a career in theater, Red Well is composed of avocational actors, therapists with a specialty in group treatment. They describe their work as follows:
Philosophically, we approach theater and group therapy as healing arts, more similar than different. Both traditions share an ability to illuminate the contextual complexity of human relatedness through the emergent interplay of the past, present, and imagined future. … Our dialogical model of learning (Stiers, 1998) combines the American community theater tradition whereby a performance is created by, with, and for a particular group of people with the ancient Athenian ideal of a public forum in which all are welcome to bear witness and openly share deeply felt experiences. (Dluhy and Schulte, 2013, p. 58)
I moderated a discussion of The Great God Pan, followed by a conversation hour, l