Century's Progress

Several of the 17 scenes were shockers.

They showed "lunatics" lying half-naked in filthy pens, or fighting like starved wolverines when a heartless jailer tossed them a moldy crust. Some inmates were in chains; some were being beaten. More astonishing than the play were the players : housewives and secretaries suffering from involutional melancholia or agitated schizophrenia, mechanics or plumbers in manic-depressive states. Among them, confined by court order, were conmen, kleptomaniacs, counterfeiters, and even some who had committed homicide.

The two-hour pageant, Cry of Humanity, was written and produced by inmates of the District of Columbia's St. Elizabeths Hospital*; to mark the vast (pop.

7,500) institution's centenary. The play is being performed before large Washington audiences this week, was seen by TV viewers last week in a 17-minute cut-down version. Cry of Humanity was a monument to Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-87), the New England schoolteacher who crusaded from Newfoundland to Louisiana for the "moral management" of the insane, persuaded Congress to open St. Elizabeths.

The play was also a mile marker on the long road from such bedlams as it depicted to new cures for mental illness and others still only hoped for.

Conceived by Dance Therapist Marian Chace, Cry of Humanity was quickly taken over by the patients. They picked the life of Dorothea Dix for its theme; it was they who insisted .on showing scenes from her early years--because they wanted to show the root causes of their heroine's own neurosis. The curtain went up on Dorothea as a nine-year-old drudge doing chores for her invalid mother (who was 20 years older than her minister-husband). Before a shabby house in Hampden. Me., neighbor children chant tauntingly: "Dorothea can't play." Not until she is 14 does the play show Dorothea happy, living with "My Aunt Sarah, who was my first real friend." In Boston, at 23, Dorothea Dix is engaged, but proves so reluctant to give up work in the school she has started that the romance collapses. Sixteen years later, on her first visit to the East Cambridge jail, where lunatics are kept alongside prisoners, one inmate snarls at her: "You couldn't attract a man if you tried." Dorothea answers: "Your words open an old wound. You see, I have my troubles, too." But thereafter she makes the troubles of the mentally ill her preoccupation.

Besides such episodes, the patient-playwrights included ballets, because they thought the dance could express feelings (in Dorothea Dix's dreams of fear and desolation) that they could not act out.

Pioneer Dix would have been heartened by the revolution in treatment and patients' outlook wrought at St. Elizabeths despite overcrowding and staff shortages.

But she would not yet have been satisfied, and neither were the patient-players in.

Cry of Humanity.

* Congress and President Pierce called it "the Government Hospital of the Insane." But it was set on an Anacostia tract long known as St.

Elizabeth's, because an early owner had been granted it "in the name of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," who labored for the insane in the 13th century. In 1916 Congress formally adopted this name (without the apostrophe).

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