Longer ago than I care to remember, I played the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story and delivered this line: “What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly; or, maybe I only think it has something to do with that.” Little did I know that over two decades later those words would become a blueprint for an important aspect of my professional life. Five years ago, I became a part-time graduate student in drama at Washington University in St. Louis. I had considered doing this before I pursued a career in medical psychoanalysis. However, I was now able to enter the graduate program with a specific agenda: to study live drama from a psychoanalytic perspective. Some of what I have learned was reported in a brief communication entitled “Unconscious Phenomena in the Process of Theater: Preliminary Hypotheses,” which appeared last year in Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
While going about my work on dramatic process, it occurred to me that pre- or postperformance discussions of plays might be a good way to engage the public in a discussion of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. In collaboration with local theaters, I soon began to arrange postperformance discussions, efforts which have met with mixed results. Plays often speak for themselves, and the players sometimes talk back. The task is more complex than decoding an inert cultural artifact like a film, because a play in production is a dynamic, living entity. Postshow discussions of live theatrical events place the discussant within the theatrical process.
There are at least three ways a psychoanalyst can contribute to a theatrical effort. The first and simplest is the postperformance discussion; the psychoanalyst offers an analysis of the play after a performance of the work. Because the actors, the director, and the playwright at times participate in such discussions, future performances may be affected, for good or ill. Second, the analyst can serve as consultant to a production, discussing the psychology of the play and its characters with the director and the cast during rehearsals. Third, the analyst can assume an active role in the production, as actor, director, assistant director, or dramaturge. In any of these roles the analyst can aid interpretation of the text, provide insight into characters' motivation, and help manage the dramatic process as rehearsals evolve into performance. The analyst serving in one of these more active roles can also participate in pre- or postperformance discussions. The more involved the analyst is with a given production, the more the analyst will identify with the artistic product. This has both advantages and disadvantages. Though critical judgment may be affected, insider status can deepen one's appreciation of both the dramatic text and the process of bringing it to life.
The first postperformance discussion I organized was an unqualified success. The play, in which I had no direct involvement, was a student production of David Hare's Plenty at Washington University. I arranged a special preview performance for Friends of the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, followed by a discussion by Gerald Izenberg, a professor of history at the university, who is also a psychoanalyst. Henry Schvey, the chair of the Performing Arts Department, served as host and moderator between the discussant, the director, and the cast. Before the event, the principals met to plan a format for the discussion. The meeting established an atmosphere of collegiality that served our efforts well. The play was well received, the analysis pithy, the discussion with director and cast lively—I was convinced that this evening of respectful and appreciative criticism helped in the evolution of this successful production.
Through the years we have developed working relationships with a number of St. Louis theaters. These include the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, the Edison Theatre (Washington University's professional theater), and the Performing Arts Department of Washington University. We have participated in discussions of operas such as Don Giovanni and Tosca, and plays as diverse as Hedda Gabler, Death and the Maiden, Buried Child, Man and Superman, and Born Yesterday. In the fall of 1994 we participated in the world première of a new play by Richard Selzer, Yale surgeon turned author, who had adapted Thomas Mann's novella The Black Swan for the stage. Selzer generously participated in an institute-sponsored postperformance discussion of his work.
There are pitfalls, of course. Some of our collaborations have not worked out. One speaker told me he would never again participate in a program with one particular theater after being asked not to deliver his prepared remarks at a postperformance discussion. Another discussant, a woman, encountered a hostile actress in a discussion after her one-woman show. When a production is an example of what Peter Brook calls “deadly theater,” brilliant analysis will do little to redeem the time wasted by the audience. We have experienced a few such evenings, yet most of our efforts have been successful. The most successful are those in which the aims of discussants and artists are similar, and where psychoanalytic insight is valued and the didactic function of the theater is taken seriously by all.
Working with commercial theaters can be tricky. Even mild criticism, such as questioning the use of a particular translation of a foreign-language classic, is at times not appreciated. Once, when I was consulting for a professional production, I led a few postshow discussions with the director and the cast. The process got off to a relatively good start in my first meeting with the director, but deteriorated thereafter. I attended a few rehearsals and voiced some mild criticism of a particular characterization to the director. My work was part of a series of discussions I had arranged for this theater, and I had been assured there would be a mention of the discussions in the program. There was not. To make matters worse, my thoughts about the play were used without attribution in the director's program notes. (In fairness, he may have had the same thoughts before our initial meeting.)
In any case, the experience culminated in an uncomfortable postperformance discussion. The director asked me to sit upstage in a chair to deliver my remarks. As I spoke, I could see my wife motioning to me, trying to tell me something. She wanted me to stand up. The director, it seems, had effectively buried me in the theater's architecture; our relationship had turned more competitive than collaborative. As the play in question centered on a series of fierce competitive situations occurring among men, the director's actions were very likely an unconscious enactment of the play's dynamics. Unwittingly, I was drawn into the theatrical process (though, since my involvement was peripheral, I must draw this conclusion only tentatively).
My appreciation of theatrical process has deepened as I have gained experience working in a variety of productions in an active capacity. I have appeared in small roles in two university productions, have served as assistant director for two others (one university and one professional), and have directed a one-act play in the university setting.
In the spring of 1991 I appeared as the Duke of Venice in a university production of Othello. Originally I had been asked to serve as a consultant to the director. When the two of us met with two student dramaturges to discuss the play, my reading of it centered on the dynamics of primal scene experiences. I advised the director that the climactic scene, in which Othello smothers Desdemona, should be played ambiguously; the audience should wonder whether they are witnessing sex or violence or both. The director was grateful for my input and, after the meeting, asked me privately whether I would be willing to play the Duke of Venice. I agreed, with the thought that as the production neared, I could interview the principal actors in order to compare my ideas about the play with theirs. This work will be reported in a paper entitled “Primal Scene Imagery in the Tragedy of Othello” in the journal Free Associations.
Regardless of my hypothesis about the text, my interviews led me into an area of inquiry that has become the focus of my theatrical work. All of the actors I interviewed, both male and female, were speaking to me ostensibly as themselves. Yet I became aware that they were behaving as if they were “in character.” The actor playing Othello was intimidating yet insecure; the actor playing lago was suspicious of my motives; the actress playing Desdemona was coquettish; and the actor playing Cassio, the good soldier, tried his best to be helpful. The extent of the transformation these individuals had undergone became apparent to me when, about a week after our production had closed, I ran into the actor who had played Othello. This young man, who had carried himself like a muscle-bound gladiator as he played Othello, in life appeared shy and foppish. At the time I thought that it was simply a matter of being “in character” or “out of character” for the actor in question. I have since learned that being in or out of character is no simple matter.
In the spring of 1992, I was assistant director for a university production of Tartuffe. In the fall of the same year I directed the one-act play Hopscotch in the same setting. As I reported in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, unconscious phenomena in the form of transference-countertransference enactments have a powerful influence on the production process; indeed, they shape live performance. The director of Tartuffe seemed to have identified strongly with the central character of the play, Orgon, and the cast collectively began to relate to her accordingly. For example, the character of Damis, Orgon's son, is angrily disinherited by his father during the course of the play. The actor playing Damis so irritated the director that she nearly stopped speaking to him. This small example illustrates my central idea. As actors and their director prepare a production, a process parallel to the emotional dynamics of the play develops during rehearsals, in the everyday interactions of cast and director. The musical Kiss Me Kate illustrates the same idea in comic form. Directing Hopscotch validated and refined my hypothesis by convincing me of both the ubiquity and the unconscious dimension of these phenomena.
The participants in the productions, with whom I shared my findings, showing them drafts of papers, took issue with my ideas. Frankly, I had offended them. Although she could see my point, the director of Tartuffe felt that for the most part she was responding to real practical problems as they arose in the production process and that the actors were merely being themselves, having been typecast. Most of all, she asked that I not report some aspects of my findings relating to her; they were too personal. The two actors in Hopscotch felt exposed and misunderstood. One, feeling violated, insisted that I suppress any publication of the actual process relating to her. My findings seemed too incendiary to be reported. Feeling that I was alienating these talented people was unsettling to me. I decided I would go back on stage, in order to use myself as a research subject. Surely I would be able to describe the process as I experienced it.
So, in the fall of 1993, I played the role of Father Dewis in Sam Shepard's Buried Child. Dewis, a hapless, ineffectual Episcopal priest, enters the play in the last act and proves unable to help the disturbed family at the center of the drama. The director and I understood that I would play the role naturalistically, although the character does have comic moments. As I prepared for the role, I inexplicably adopted an external approach to the character, modeling my performance on some mimicry I developed in my childhood. After a rehearsal, the director told me that my performance was slipping into caricature. He wanted me to appear to be an outsider to the family, but not outside the play. Feeling humiliated, I rehearsed my lines privately the next day and reflected on the previous evenings rehearsal.
The character Dewis is humiliated in the play, proving to be out of his depth in a crisis that involves the father's confession of infanticide. Dewis exits pleading helplessness. It began to dawn on me that what went on with the director involved an enactment; I felt out of my depth in the role. What was my problem? As I reflected while rehearsing my lines, an incident from my past came to mind. My heart sank, and I knew then why my work had met with such a hostile response. Enactments, when analyzed and understood, cut close to the bone. The incident that came to mind involved a clinical brush with infanticide, early in my career as a psychiatrist. Needless to say, the incident disturbed me deeply at the time. The enactment with the director, my adopting the external approach that elicited his criticism, signaled resistance. I did not want to identify with the character of Dewis because I feared I was too much like him, at least in one troubling situation in my past. I wondered whether this might be a general characteristic of enactments in the theatrical process.
When I learned that a professional production of Selzer's The Black Swan would be produced by the Edison Theatre at Washington University, I signed on as assistant to the director. I was eager to test my ideas in a professional production, and was curious to see whether I might learn something new about enactments in the process of theater. I found that the most troubling and disruptive enactments signal resistance within the actor to identification with the character being portrayed. Disruptive enactments, initiated by two different actors, occurred at two different points in the production process. I cannot report these events because I do not have the actors' consent. I can report that these two situations were crises for the director, and I explained my take on them to him. He found my understanding of these disruptions helpful, for it enabled him to manage these crises effectively. To me, it felt something akin to consulting with a colleague about an ongoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I also learned something new. Enactments are ubiquitous and not always disruptive, even when unconscious. Enactments have a reinforcing function; they reinforce the emotions being portrayed.
When I felt humiliated by the director of Buried Child, I was reinforcing an emotion I needed to find for the character. My resistance signaled a deeper level of actual identification. The professional actors I observed in The Black Swan enacted constantly by flirting, fighting, knowing-it-all, or whatever happened to be the issue for the character they were playing. Only when disruptive did these enactments signal resistance. In my Psychoanalytic Quarterly paper I posited that enactments serve the actor by forging emotional links between the actors true self and the false self that is the character. Stephen Aaron, in his exploration of the psychology of acting (Stage Fright: Its Role in Acting), hesitates to use the term “false self” in relation to the actor's task. He has a point. What is observed in performance is the hypertrophy of certain aspects of the actors true self or, as Aaron puts it, the actors “personal self,” at least if the acting is any good.
The importance of these findings for theater people has yet to be determined. My ideas are controversial to some, irrelevant to others. What importance they have for psychoanalysts is difficult for me to judge. For analysts engaging in postperformance discussions that include director or cast, be forewarned; you are likely to encounter the emotional atmosphere of the play, as well as the characters inhabiting it — disguised as theatrical professionals. Raising questions rather than providing answers may be the most prudent approach. The theatrical process is complex and demanding, paradoxically requiring no small amount of self-sacrifice, as drama theorists, especially Artaud and Grotowski, have asserted. Enter at your own risk.