Toward a Dramaturgy of Healing and Care

“I don’t want to give the violence any more airtime” was one of the first things I said in the rehearsal room for After, There Will Be Flowers. It was important to me and to Eden Middleton, the project’s co-creator, to center the story of healing over the story of violence and abuse. While the latter is perhaps catchier, sexier, and voyeuristically appealing in a way that helps ticket sales, we were more concerned with the trudge and strength it takes to heal after experiencing physical, emotional, and sexual violence.

The show was structured with a standard, scripted opening. This opening, however, had holes in it—a question of who these characters were, why they had an empty vase but said they brought flowers, and why they were mirroring each other's movement. We wanted to establish a sense of liminality and unease through these questions—to create a space for haunting. The play then shifted in time through a “ripple of trauma,” which brought the characters into a dream state (to borrow from clowning vocabulary). The “ripple of trauma” allowed the performers to begin interacting with the audience through a series of repeated requests for fabric draped throughout the performance space. The performers “tried on” a variety of swaths, trying to find the right fit, the most comfortable cloaking, evoking a sense of lost control that often comes when trying to find footing after a trauma. The dream state they landed in was in neither reality nor a complete magical realm but rather straddled the two, using poetic text paired with sometimes abstract, sometimes pedestrian choreography.

To capture the stages of grief/healing, Eden and I worked with our choreographer, Emily Losier, to create five distinct movement phrases, each encapsulated by one word: hurt, cleanse, comfort, dream, and reclaim. Each phrase ended with a question posed to the audience. Their answers, unbeknownst to the audience, prompted a new phrase. With this responsive set of movement phrases, the audience was taken to a new sensation, but not necessarily one that brought the characters to a finalized place of healing. This structure, we hoped, would show that healing isn’t linear. The characters, like a person in real life, can revert to a state of deeper grief or trauma, even if they are temporally further removed from the moment of hurt.

In keeping with theatrical tradition, and in an effort to leave our audience with some sense of catharsis, the play shifted back out of a dream state to reality again, repeating the opening scene but with answers to the questions: The performers were two sides of one person, embodying grief and passion. The vase was filled with flowers that the audience received upon entering the space, which were collected during the transition back from dream state to reality. Finally, even though the characters experienced trauma, grief, and healing, that journey wasn’t done and may never be done. But that they had supports (embodied by the audience), and they had a renewed sense of agency.

How do we care for ourselves in the rehearsal room? How is care ensured for the actors when they perform?

Dramaturgy of Healing

The circularity of the healing process was our main focus. We did not want to give more limelight to the banality of violence. Instead, we took the typical language of the trajectory of healing often found in psychology—establishing safety, processing, reconnecting with oneself and others, and finding growth—and focused on the non-linear way in which these steps occur. Unlike a traditional play structure, which proposes a problem and brings us to a somewhat neat conclusion by the end of the play, healing is not so cut and dry. Sometimes there is no catharsis. To achieve this non-linearity, we looked at the text and movement as an algorithm or a choose-your-own adventure. Audiences were implicated as the community of the character that was healing, and audience members helped guide the narrative. Just as real people may try to help but accidentally retraumatize a person, there was an option that the character in the show would be guided towards a “backwards” step in healing. We also wanted to provide the opportunity for audience members to reflect on their own journeys. Whether they had experienced abuse or violence in intimate relationships or not, there is a safe assumption that all of us hold the universal experience of having been hurt and trying to heal.

Practice of Care

A key component and continued conversation throughout the process was care. How do we care for ourselves in the rehearsal room? How is care ensured for the actors when they perform? How is the audience, who is being asked to guide the performance, cared for? Eden and I knew this piece would be heavy since the unpredictable nature of the algorithmic choices could yield a show that never truly reached those lighter steps of a healing journey. So we established a series of mechanisms of consent and of care.

This was an intentional choice that honored the emotional vulnerability of audience members without leaving the creative team holding both their own experience of performing, stage managing, or hosting the show and the experience of an audience member. 

Audience Mechanisms of Consent

Participatory theatre is not every audience member’s cup of tea. Recognizing that, we wanted to ensure that audience members knew they had full autonomy. Within the aesthetics of the show, we built in two consent mechanisms—candles and questions. When entering the space, audience members were given a candle and instructed that a lit candle signaled to the actors that the audience member was open to interaction. That was step one. Step two—questions and offerings built into the script that allowed multiple opportunities for audience members to opt out of participating. We started off with a gentle invitation of participation—“Will you be my friend?” We then slowly scaffolded to the toughest question, the question that would determine the next phrase. These questions sounded like: “Do you think about the future? What does it sound like?” or “What do you see when you look at me?”

Preparation

To ensure that our audience participation wasn’t limited to the five individuals who would be asked questions throughout the show, we introduced talkback walls postered throughout the venue. Audience members were invited to add their answers anonymously. These posters allowed participants to contribute to the conversation and prepared them for when they heard the questions within the show. We recognized that the final questions of each phrase were abstract, requiring vulnerability and imagination, and most people do not enjoy being put on the spot when they are in the audience. Instead, to prepare someone for answering a question like “What does safety smell like?” we provided space, time, and anonymity to think of an answer. (Here we had an unanticipated phenomenon occur. Audience members would add their answers after the show as well, perhaps prompted by the questions or emotions raised throughout the show.)

Relaxed Environment

Recognizing that the goal was not to retraumatize our audience, we built in a clear guideline that the performance was a relaxed one. The show took place in an imagined cafe, and audiences were invited to have a cup of tea before the show started. The tea station was left out throughout the show, creating a clear signal that audience members could at any time get up, make some more tea, leave the space, and return when they were ready.

In addition, it was important to have space for audience members to debrief or take time to regulate any emotions that bubbled up throughout the show. To this end, we contracted a series of peer support folks, who remained outside in the lobby of the venue before, during, and after the show to be an unattached but caring party for audiences. This was an intentional choice that honored the emotional vulnerability of audience members without leaving the creative team holding both their own experience of performing, stage managing, or hosting the show and the experience of an audience member.

Room for Joy

The last aspect I want to highlight in this process was the intentional room for joy and play that was critical in my creating and directing practice. I wanted to work against the standard practice of “leaving it at the door” when entering a rehearsal hall and instead make room for the full range of our humanness, which is ultimately brought into the rehearsal space. I hold a firm belief that “leaving it at the door” is an outdated practice rooted heavily in white supremacy, ableism, and a general lack of care for those creating theatre. With this room to be open, vulnerable, and bring whatever “baggage” the team was holding that day, there was not only room for deep sorrow and grief that yielded itself well to the context of the show, but also immense joy and playfulness that also filtered into the piece. Ultimately, this joy and playfulness then led to the discovery of moments that allowed deeper sadness to also be present in the piece and in the room.

Overall, the development and performance of this piece was an exercise in two things. First, how do we create theatre that shifts the types of stories we spotlight? Second, what is dramaturgy of care? Throughout the process and the show run itself, we learned in an iterative way that care begets care, sensitivity unlocks new ideas, and bravery to speak on less flashy themes provides a safe healing space. While the goal of this work was never to replace therapy with art making, the art making itself became therapeutic. I would encourage others who are questioning whether the “unsexy” parts of life deserve a chance to see the limelight to try. While the common practice is to continue to sensationalize violence, to give airtime to stories that center perpetrators and “victims,” I encourage you to stage the softness, the despair, the pulling oneself out of the muck of pain and trauma and give light to those moments. In experiencing them together through the cathartic lens of theatre, we can not only shift the theatrical canon—we can shift our perceptions of each other.