New York City and the theater arts go hand in hand. How can you visit the Big Apple and not see a Broadway or Off-Broadway play while you're in town? Reflecting this vital part of New York's fabric, the Scientific Program for the Winter 2009 Meeting features three outstanding theater-related sessions.
Stage design at a Winter Meeting? Tony award nominated (The Pajama Game, 2006) set designer Derek McLane will join the discussion group, “Friedrich Durenmatt's The Visit: Super-Ego Failure in a Group,” as presenter. The Visit, a play that has recently been staged as a musical, is frequently seen as symbolic of how Nazis gained popular support in Germany. The Visit portrays the gradual dissolution of super-ego functioning as impulses. Feelings are rationalized, individual responsibility is relaxed and denied, and primitive group standards are substituted for individual integrity. The play also depicts the group's investing an authority figure with power to override their consciences. The chairs for this discussion group which will take place on Thursday morning, January 15, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., are Eva F. Lichtenberg and Arnold D. Tobin.
McLane, who designed the sets for two productions (1991 and 2008) of The Visit, will discuss his own experience and story analysis of the play in context of this discussion group, paying close attention to Freud's Group Psychology which attendees are encouraged to read. He will likely illustrate his remarks with images of the set designs and may sketch as well.
On Thursday evening, January 15, the theater discussion group chaired by APsaA members Fred Sander and Phillip Freeman will see a live production as a point of departure for discussion of how analytic theory has been and can be applied to theater events. This year, the discussion group will see the Broadway production of Christopher Shinn's (past APsaA Fellow, Obie Award winner, and 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist) adaptation of Hedda Gabler starring Tony award winner Mary-Louise Parker. Playwright Shinn will meet with the group at a neighborhood restaurant prior to the 8:00 p.m. curtain to discuss how psychoanalytic ideas informed his adaptation.
“Henrik Ibsen's great social drama is contemporaneous with the birth of psychoanalysis and draws from the same wellspring of ideas,” says Freeman. “When we discuss the challenges of mounting a contemporary performance of this late 19th century play in the present year, we may discover echoes of negotiating early psychoanalytic ideas into contemporary practice.”
Prospective participants are asked to e-mail Fred Sander, , expressing their interest in attending.
Dottie Jeffries is APsaA's director of public affairs.
Also exciting is the symposium, “The Real and the Imagined in Psychoanalysis and Theater,” that will explore psychoanalysis and theater, the relationship between psychoanalysts and theater artists, and possibilities for mutual enrichment. The symposium will take place on Saturday, January 17, from 12:00 noon-1:30 p.m., and features playwright Christopher Shinn and noted theater director Anne Bogart as well as APsaA members Phillip Freeman, (the symposium chair) who is a consultant to theater troupes including the American Repertory Theatre; and Henry F. Smith, a past Performing Arts Fulbright Scholar in acting and playwriting. Shinn's adaptation of Hedda Gabler opens on Broadway in early January 2009. Shinn is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and teaches playwriting at the New School for Drama. Bogart, a professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program, is a recipient of two Obie Awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Bogart will be directing Freshwater, Virginia Woolf's only play, which will be open in preview Off-Broadway the weekend of the Winter Meeting.
So be sure to partake of these sessions on the Meeting's Scientific Program at the Waldorf, and find time for one or more of these exciting productions listed here. The curtain's going up! Enjoy New York.