Theatrical Therapy

The audience in the 250-seat auditorium of the sleek new Veterans Administration Hospital in Salt Lake City last week was restless at first. But no audience ever entered more wholeheartedly into the spirit of a production. For the spectators were mental patients, and they were watching fellow patients enact a play about something they all felt intimately --the appearance of mental illness under unbearable strain. The play: The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.

In the therapeutic technique of psychodrama (TIME, Jan. 24), patients act out their own experiences or roles related to them; in presenting Herman Wouk's Court Martial, the patients did the opposite: they had to adapt themselves, like any actors, to prefabricated roles. Remarkable was the fact that they chose the play themselves, without prompting from the hospital's recreation staff, and assigned most of the parts.

Too Close to Home. At first, the hospital's top doctors were shaken by the project, judged it dangerous, and could see no benefit to the mentally ill in doing a play whose chief character is mentally ill. But after watching rehearsals, the doctors were converted. Says Clinical Psychologist John Whitmyre: "Something remote would not have aroused such intense interest. This cast really knows mental illness. The patients are intense about this play because it raises the questions: 'What are the criteria for mental illness? What is the dividing line?'

As rehearsals went on, it was soon clear that members of the cast were gaining inner satisfaction from watching Captain Queeg, the man in position of responsibility and trust, break down under stress. As Psychiatrist Edward R. Miller explains it, this helped many patients to feel that "it could happen to anyone"--so they felt less different themselves. Also, they enjoyed the humbling of a "father-figure," for many had troubles that traced back to their own fathers or other authoritarian figures. Best of all, characters in the play were able to act out their hostility to Father-Figure Queeg without feeling guilt.

This Way Out. For several in the cast, rehearsals proved too effective a therapy for the play's own good: these patients improved so much that they were discharged. One patient had seemed hopeless, despite a variety of treatments. "As he mastered his role," says Dr. Miller, "he mastered himself and we could reach him better with psychotherapy." He is now working to support his family, and living at home. Another patient, who at first could not remember lines for more than a few minutes, eventually memorized his part letter-perfect, and his memory for other matters improved. A third, who insisted he could not see his script or even a cue card, was won around to the point where first he read fluently, then acted his part freely.

There were two parts in the Court Martial that no mental patient would play: those of Queeg himself and the judge advocate. They refused to play Queeg, explains Dr. Miller, because they feared that enacting a make-believe breakdown might cause a real breakdown: "They don't want to be identified with mental illness. They want to be normal." Neither would the patients tolerate a familiar, forbidding father-figure (such as Psychiatrist Miller himself) in the part of Queeg. Their choice fell on a "good father-figure": Chester Dowse, amiable chief of the hospital's special services department (which includes all recreation). Dowse's assistant, Howard Becker, played the judge advocate.

The spectators burst into applause when Queeg broke on the witness stand under the defense counsel's hammering. But this, Dr. Miller judged, was in appreciation of the fine performance. By and large, the audience sympathized deeply with the man who broke under stress.

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