Yes But Is It Theatre or Therapy?

by David Diamond

This article was written some years ago, but the topic is still part of a major debate among Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners. It is featured on the Bulletin Board on the Headlines Theatre website. We thank David Diamond for his permission to publish it in UP.

I used to think this question would finally go away. Unfortunately, the mainstream theatre and society have made such an artificial separation between art and life that I am now resigned to answering the question forever:

We all know that if we bottle our emotions up inside us -- if we do not express ourselves -- we get sick. A community is the same. Just as you are a collection of individual cells that make up your body, a community is a collection of individual people that make up the living organism of the community. Just like a person, if a community does not express itself, it gets sick. The way communities used to express themselves was through song, dance, drama, painting etc. In our modern society, culture has transformed from something that people do as a natural part of everyday life into something that people consume. Now we buy tickets to cultural events. We sit passively in the dark while experts deliver us a cultural experience that, most often (in my experience), has very little to do with our lives. This is one of the reasons our communities are sick -- because we do not give ourselves permission anymore to express ourselves as community.

In a therapy situation the focus of the event is the individual. We would begin, focus on and end with the individual. In THEATRE FOR LIVING we start with the singular individual and move to the pluralized community. We create an opportunity for a community to use the primal lan-guage of the theatre to express itself by telling a symbolic, collective story, not one person's story. Doing so is bound to be therapeutic for the community and the individuals that make up the It is not, however, therapy. Headlines is a professional theatre company, not a social service agency.

It is my contention that all theatre teaches strong lessons through what-ever we put onto the stage, whether we are working with professional actors and designers in regional theatres or non-professionals in community halls.

Oleanna
I want to use David Mamet's Oleanna as a symbol of what I mean, not because I think it stands alone, or because I want to attack it, but because how it fits into this discussion is clear for me. I see THEATRE FOR LIVING and Oleanna as being of equal value and operating on equally deep emotional levels.

Oleanna is a play about a power struggle between a young, female student and a middle aged, male university professor. A purposefully ambiguous moment, created by the playwright, happens between them. She charges him with sexual harassment and ruins his career. He beats her up. End of play, and (in Vancouver) beginning of discussion session.

Evidently, when Oleanna was produced in some other cities, audience members were on their feet at the end of the play yelling "Kill the bitch!". In Vancouver, my own reaction when the female student was beaten was that "it was about time". This took me by surprise because I am not a violent person, but then I realized that I had been very deftly manipulated into that place -- perhaps to challenge me. OK. Fair enough. Headlines' female General Manager said that she felt like she had been beaten up.

Consider that statistically approximately 60% of women in Canada experience some sort of abuse in their lives. It follows then, that a significant percentage of men abuse at some time in their lives. It follows then that a significant percentage of the men in any audience (including Headlines') are, or have, or will abuse their wife, girlfriends, daughters or mother at some point in their lives. How many of these men walked out of Oleanna having that behaviour reinforced? 25%? 50%? How many of the women who had suffered abuse were traumatized by the brutality of the ending? I ask these as honest questions, not rhetorical ones.

Regardless of what we put on the stage, theatre deals with emotion and psychology. A lot of Headlines' work, because it is self-aware and actively delves into community issues, is very often labeled "therapy" while productions like Oleanna, existing in mainstream theatres, enjoy the label of "art". It appears to me that companies like Headlines, that actively engage in social issues, get stigmatized for what they do while companies that present their work purely as "theatrical art" are not expected to be socially responsible.

It is important to understand though that all art is political, including theatre. All art has a message, whether it is to challenge the status quo or to reinforce it. Artists do not have the luxury of sitting on the fence. Ever. The creation of art itself, the act itself is political. As Augusto wrote in Theatre of the Oppressed: "All theatre is political because all of the activities of men (and women) are political and theatre is one of them. Those who try to separate theatre from politics try to lead us into error and that in itself is a political attitude."

As an artist I want my audience to be different after the play than before it. This transformational capability is, to me, the sign of good theatre. I would go so far as to say that if a theatrical event does not change audience members in some way, small or large, regardless of how spectacular the costumes, lights, sound or the acrobatics of the script might be, it cannot be good theatre. THEATRE FOR LIVING has the potential, like all theatre, to be great theatre.

Under Pressure 8, November 2001