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This is a very violent society full of a lot of hate. You can't put a band-aid on a suppurating wound. The morality of the theatre is to tell the truth the best way you can. When you're not doing that, you're being immoral. — David Mamet (in an interview prior to the opening of Edmond, The New York Times, October 24, 1982)
Edmond, go home. — Walter Kerr (in a review of Edmond, The New York Times, November 7, 1982)
The simple answer to this not-so-simple question seems to be No — only persons are properly termed sick, and it is only by analogy that other systems incur medical or psychiatric diagnoses. Thus we may refer to an ailing economy, to a cancerous growth on the Presidency (as John Dean did early in the Watergate debacle), or to a theatre we ambivalently regard as the Fabulous Invalid — chronically ill with periodic outbreaks of health. But speaking literally, we permit only people to fall ill.
Certainly this view sounds persuasive, and yet when we reflect that psychiatric disorders arise in the interpersonal sphere and ought not (as Thomas Szasz and others caution us) to be derived from the disease model of medicine, the perspective blurs and fosters a change in focus. Furthermore, in the interpersonal sphere of art, an artist's deepest emotions may be projected onto a medium specifically adapted to arouse powerful spectator responses, ranging from delight to despair, anguish to awe, outrage to insight. The plight of Hamlet may be more