They Let Crazy People Put on a Play
It happens all the time; crazy people put on plays in America; and in other places. We, the mentally ill, are drawn to theatre (that’s how “we” spell it, because it’s more DRAMATIC, and we’re “like that” because we’re crazy) for a wide variety of reasons. You wouldn’t really understand. Because you’re norm-core. You wear pleated-front pants. You shop at Kohl’s. You majored in Business.
Some crazy people put on a play in 2014. They were led by a REALLY crazy person, and the play was put on at a crazy place: Norristown State Hospital. The play was “Our Town” and one might be tempted to think that the play chosen was the least crazy thing about the whole experience, but I would remind you that “Our Town” was first performed in 1938 and, when audiences walked in and saw a totally bare stage, well, that was crazy.
Crazy is a state of mind. Or a space in time.
Our time was December 20th and 21st at Building 33, a practically abandoned 600-seat theatre that, long ago, during the heyday of the state hospital era, was used to stage plays with the patients, and show movies. The last time the building was used for something other than a continuing education class for psych nurses was over 25 years ago. A production of “A Christmas Carol.” The crazy person in charge of “Our Town” walked in and took a look around; at the hundreds of seats, at the dressing rooms replete with lighted mirrors, and thought, “This looks like Grover’s Corners to me.”
I am that crazy man.
When I started working at the psychiatric hospital known as Montgomery County Emergency Service in 2010, I told myself, and my wife, that I wasn’t “going to get to know these people. I don’t want to know them. I want to just come in, keep my head down, do my job, and get the fuck out of there.”
Not only did I get to know “those people”, but I fell in love with them. And, when you fall in love with people, as the Stage Manager says in Act II, “you’re just a little bit crazy.”
You want to do all kinds of things for people you love. You want to give them things — presents. When I was falling in love with my wife, I gave her all kinds of presents. I was courting. I was effusive. I was quite mad.
When I was courting my colleagues, I gave them a play; the gift of the most produced play in America; the quintessential stage-play; the play without which we would be greatly diminished; Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
Theatre isn’t a nail-bomb or a dry cake. It’s not a gag gift. “Our Town” isn’t something you give to people you don’t like, or love. I held this play, trembling in my hands, and offered it up as if it were made of gold and glass and blood. Thankfully, my friends accepted it. Some of them unwillingly at first.
I pursued my prey — the staff members at MCES; the ones I wanted. As word spread that I was hell-bent on doing this play, some staff members regarded me with suspicion as I approached them in the hallway or the chartroom, a script on top of my ubiquitous clipboard. I never took “no” for an answer. I got who I wanted. My Doc Gibbs, my Emily. My Simon Stimson.
Psychiatric Technicians, Registered Nurses, Social Workers, Allied Therapists, Hospital administrators. Crisis workers. Mine. Forever.
At the first rehearsal, my friends and colleagues — the vast majority of whom had never been in a play — gathered together on the stage at the un-air-conditioned Building 33 on August 27th and peppered me with questions about rehearsal schedules, performance anxiety, costumes, make-up, accents, the meaning of the play. I answered some of their questions with “I don’t know” and I made up some answers, too. It was so hot that night; sweat was rolling down our necks and our legs. Very un-New Hampshire.
But then, “Our Town” isn’t about New Hampshire at all — the same way “The Mikado” isn’t about Japan. I mean; it is, and it isn’t. It’s about us.
You, and me.
I’m on a train right now as I write this — a train from Virginia to Orlando. The trees are going by at 70 miles-per-hour. We are on our phones and our tablets. We passed by Quantico; nobody batted an eyelash. There is a large-bellied white man with glasses eating peanut M&M’s across the aisle from me. I will spend 17 hours with him, and I will probably never know his name, or meet his gaze.
Just look at me for one minute as though you really saw me.
They didn’t think it could be done, those actors of mine. They didn’t know that they had it in them. These people who care for folks dealing with some of the most severe and persistent mental health challenges possible; these people who are fighting quiet battles of their own. Someone recently commended me for the unusual act of going to work at a psychiatric hospital while dealing with mental health problems of my own. I laughed.
“That’s the most common thing in the world,” I answered, “I just think I’m maybe one of the few who’s talking about it.”
There isn’t a soul among us, keys and ID badge or not, who isn’t working through something, who isn’t swallowing a memory or a trauma with their eyes firmly closed shut, who isn’t strolling down the hallway chiming, “Group Time!” while shielding a cracked heart.
Two years later, we reconvened on the stage where we produced that play. Many of us had moved onto other jobs. But we proved Thornton Wilder wrong; you can go back. But he was right about one thing; it does have a price; it can be painful.
Thornton Wilder’s creation of “Our Town” was a revolutionary act; a message to the world and a response to the typical theatrical conventions of its time. Staging “Our Town” with a rag-tag bunch of psychiatric hospital employees was, though I didn’t realize it at the time, an act of rebellion against a system that consistently brutalized its patients and its employees, that told staff members that they are not special, they are not deserving of recognition beyond a WaWa gift-card or a misspelled mention in the childish newsletter. People who are told, quite literally, that getting assaulted is part of their job and that, if they don’t like it; they know where to find the door.
Theatre humanizes; it elevates and it ennobles. And, by clothing some of the finest folk I know in period costumes, mutton chops, watch fobs, up-do’s, and long, plain black skirts, they became human and noble to the community, to the people who didn’t understand them, who hated them for the system they represented — they were finally seen by others, and hopefully by themselves, the way I always saw them.
If you love people; let them know. Get crazy and give them a play and, if you’re unsure which one; make it “Our Town.” You’ll save money on sets, and there’s one or two other pluses, too.
