"Merely Players"

"Last week we had Hitler here. We sent him up on the balcony with the gods, gave him a Goering, a Goebbels, and tried to make him happy. We also had Hamlet. As soon as he came we supplied him with a ghost. We gave him a mother too, but when he went on the stage, he killed her."

That is the way Dr. Jacob L. Moreno describes the life at his Psychodramatic Institute in Beacon, N.Y. Psychodrama is Dr. Moreno's method for treating mental ills--a sort of theatrical psychoanalysis which he uses for troubled mortals, as well as for Hitlers and Hamlets. Instead of lying on a couch and confiding their woes to a psychoanalyst, patients act out their problems, impromptu, on a bare little stage. Many a patient who is hostile or shy refuses at first to take part, suddenly blurts out his hidden neurosis.

Spontaneous Combustion. In the Institute, a rambling white house and little theater on the green slopes of the Hudson Valley, live about 20 patients of all ages, with all forms of mental illness. The patients work around the estate, gardening, running the theater. The theater, made of pungent, unpainted wood, with seats for some 80 people, has a circular stage on three levels, with a balcony overhead for patients with delusions of grandeur. There are no curtains or scenery, only two pillars in the background, a bare table and chairs. Floodlights of three different intensities play on the stage, corresponding to the patient's mood: soft white, red for excitement, dim blue for soliloquies.

Several afternoons a week, a carefully selected group of patients meets in the theater. Dr. Moreno picks one protagonist, who has been prepared by long, intimate conferences, and they sit together on the steps of the stage, planning a rough outline of the scene they will reenact. Other actors in the drama are also picked by the doctor--usually they are patients too, but sometimes a part is taken by a specially trained professional actress. The patient may act himself, his mother, his wife, or any role he chooses. The actors all move freely about the stage, sometimes merely chatting, sometimes bursting out with hidden longings, or even "killing each other." Somehow acting integrates broken fragments of a split personality. A patient who is obsessed by death, for example, may forget his terrors when he acts the part of a grocer or salesman. The little dramas unfold as spontaneously as children playing.

Dr. Moreno has helped many a frustrated married couple, has even tackled "triangles" with all the participants on the stage at once. In one smash-hit he brought a wife and her Don Juan husband to the theater, collected as audience and cast 75 persons who were all involved in one way or another. In marital storms, claims the doctor, psychodrama brings far better results than psychoanalysis, for he can deal with both partners at the same time, in dynamic situations.

Starring John Doe. "Psychodrama is not acting," says Dr. Moreno, "it is a new world. The patients are in a miniature society where life is simplified. They ad just themselves on the stage to real situations. They are in constant movement, planning, directing, guiding their lives, working together. If they can adjust them selves on the stage, they can learn to do it outside. Orthodox psychoanalysis only makes a patient feel more self-conscious and lonely. Away with the isolationism of the analyst's couch!"

Dr. Moreno started his "spontaneous drama" in Vienna in 1921, where he directed a group of healthy children at play. Among his child proteges were Actors Peter Lorre and Elisabeth Bergner. His technique is studied in many U.S. schools (Hunter College, Bennington College, Duke University). Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital has a therapeutic theater and one was recently started in huge St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Psychodrama is equally useful, says the doctor, in determining vocational aptitudes--people are asked to act out certain job situations before a trained observer, tested for their reaction to embarrassing predicaments.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.