Beyond Therapy?

In a recent Times piece "Therapist and Patient Share a Theater of Hurt,” (NYT, 11/5/14), Robert J. Landy, director of N.Y.U.’s drama therapy program makes the following statement, “With certain forms of mental illness that do not respond to conventional treatment, we need a more radical approach, which therapeutic theater can provide.” That approach apparently can involve turning therapy sessions into dramatic works that sound like they could even make money. The article describes rehearsals for Borderline, a musical based on the interaction between a therapist named Cecilia Dintino and her patient, Jill Powell, an actress who appeared in “As the World Turns” and on Broadway in Grand Hotel, and Damn Yankees, but whose career had become sidelined by mental illness. One, of course, can only have sympathy for the suffering Ms. Powell has endured. Acting is no cakewalk and she wouldn’t be the first actor to  exploit their own difficulties in the service of art. The method acting technique employed by the The Actor’s Studio is based on using inner emotions and conflicts to create a character. But it’s one thing to reach inside one’s autobiography and another to titrate actual therapy into theater. If this were to become a trend it would also raise some humorous possibilities. For instance, Freudian analysis is notoriously long, longer even than the legendary long rehearsals Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory have undertaken for their productions of Vanya on 42nd Street and most recently A Master Builder.  With all the years it takes and all the silence in which the analyst says nothing, patients in Freudian analysis might contemplate the idea of producing a musical called When Will This End?  Perhaps if it were successful such a musical would amortize the cost of this notoriously expensive form of treatment. Cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal therapy would be just a few of the other therapies represented with Greenwich Village, Park Avenue and Upper West Side offices being turned into the equivalent of 42^nd Street’s theater row. No need to enroll at Juilliard or Yale, just tell it like it is. Maybe this was what Chris Durang was thinking about when he wrote Beyond Therapy?

Cialis Now and Then

There’s the famous scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton they have to get the kiss over with so they can get on with the date. So in the same spirit let’s get the Cialis joke off. Contrary to the disclaimer in the television commercials about calling a doctor if you have an erection for more than four hours, wouldn’t it be best to call all your friends?  But there are actually other things wrong with the commercials. In theater circles there used to be a battle between adherents to the Stanislavski, Moscow Art Theater Model, known as “the method” and practiced by the Actor’s Studio in the States and the say Meyerhold creating a mask model of acting. The ferocity of the conflict between the two was tantamount to the struggle between capitalism and communism. The actors in the Cialis commercial seem to be suffering from a conflict between these two kinds of conservatory training. On the one hand they are plainly attempting to create realistic characters by delving into their own psychological histories, in depicting the dilemma of a man who wants to be functional with the woman he loves when the right time comes. But  they are plainly straining under the burden of the realism. In fact as we know all kinds of unconscious drives contribute to sexual performance along with physiological capability and so the actor who taking a Willy Loman approach to his portrait of the slightly over the hill middle-aged man will likely be suppressing his inner Ubu Roi. Naturally commercials are just that—commercial. So they can’t aspire to the highest levels of theatrical art. The technique of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater will probably never be invoked in the making of a Cialis commercial. But that’s not to say that the commercial wouldn’t have profited if it broke down the putative fourth wall. As Picasso said, “art is the lie that tells the truth.” Directors of commercials for drugs like Cialis might be advised to throw verisimilitude to the winds when they deal with the problem of erectile dysfunction.