A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD TECHIE plagued by shattering anxiety. A musician whose career is derailed by alcoholism. An aspiring actor in the grip of bulimia. Are these psychiatric case studies or characters in a play? These days, it is harder than ever to tell the difference.
The troubled tech worker mentioned above is a character from Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job, which recently ended its run at the Connelly Theater and will transfer to Broadway this summer. The taut-as-piano-wire play opens with a young woman aiming a gun at a man (Peter Friedman) who turns out to be her therapist. The woman, Jane, is a disaffected employee at a Big Tech company who has been sent to therapy after a very public breakdown at work; as a condition of her reinstatement, she needs a doctor to vouch for her mental health. “I didn’t come here of my own, like, free will, exactly,” she says shortly before taking a ball-peen hammer to her therapist’s profession. “People with your job come into work wanting to connect trauma A to trauma D, so they always do; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever. That way of thinking fully rots your brain. You stop being able to see what’s right in front of your face, you stop being able to talk to people.” This rebuke is delivered at warp speed by Sydney Lemmon, whose pallor evokes the long hours her character has spent confined to the office, being irradiated by her computer screen. In its vivid vivisection of one woman’s nervous breakdown, there’s no better case study of millennial dis-ease and the warping—not to say paranoiac—effects of being very online.
Of course, there were plays about therapy before the onset of the pandemic. Most memorably, the pre-Covid years gave us Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things, both of which indelibly dramatized the theatrical aspects of therapy and rehab sessions. (The protagonist of the latter adopts several aliases and as many different personalities while undergoing treatment for drug addiction.) Yet one senses that the connection between theater and therapy has intensified since the pandemic, which came with a boatload of stressors: everything from enforced isolation to job precarity to domestic violence. Studies show that the number of Americans experiencing depression or anxiety increased during the pandemic, as did the number seeking treatment for mental health problems.1
Job’s aggressively bland office setting—the visual equivalent of white noise—could have worked just as well for any number of other plays from this year, appearing mostly off-Broadway, that are irrigated with therapy tropes. From a play set in a Buddhist meditation center (The Fears) to a musical starring a vaudevillian chorus of demonic thoughts (Relapse), the post-Covid years have unleashed freshets of dramatic works that explore the ways people seek connection—or, failing that, what Freud called “ordinary unhappiness”—through different forms of therapy. Far from the madding crowd of online trolls or hostile coworkers, characters in “therapy plays” are induced to reveal their phobias, fantasies, and insecurities: the bunions of polite conversation. Even if they don’t explicitly break the fourth wall, they often interpellate the audience, making us informal participants in a kind of “wild analysis,” to appropriate another locution from Freud.
Jamieson Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York and the coauthor, with Simon Critchley, of Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine alongside several other books on psychoanalysis, told me that the number of people seeking treatment for anxiety peaked during the pandemic. Correspondingly, she contends, there is now “less of a stigma” attached to seeking therapy. Webster has seen patients as young as two and as old as seventy and from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. She also reminded me that the relationship between theater and therapy flows both ways, with theater occupying a huge place in psychoanalysis. “People sometimes think of therapy sessions as very serious, truth-bound conversations when in fact people are trying on all kinds of different roles and trying to get into different perspectives,” she told me. A psychoanalyst is not some impartial spectator or supervisor, but “someone who’s struggling along with you, the patient.” When we watch a live performance of a therapy play, something similar happens. We flit between both positions in a dialectical performance of our own: analyst one moment, patient the next. We struggle—and straggle—along.
In the past season alone, after a pandemic-induced caesura, there have been several notable attempts to deconstruct therapy, satirize it, celebrate it, mimic it.2 In Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria, therapy serves as both organizing principle and bone of contention. First mounted in 2018 at the Dublin Theater Festival, the play got a second life during the pandemic when it was presented in 2022 by St. Ann’s Warehouse. The show is loosely based on—and takes the form of—a series of therapy sessions between Gloria Szymanski (played by Liv O’Donoghue) and three white male therapists (played by Moxley) in 1964. Over the course of several sessions, the real-life Gloria shared with her therapists her anxieties over raising her daughter as a single mother and dating as a divorcée. The therapy sessions were filmed and widely distributed, without her consent; one can still easily find “Three Approaches to Psychotherapy” (or “The Gloria Films”) online. Moxley’s play is an attempt to grab the narrative reins back from the male therapists—Dr. Carl Rogers, a practitioner of Person-Centered Therapy; Dr. Fritz Perls, advocate of Gestalt Therapy; and Dr. Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Therapy—who for decades controlled the story of Szymanski. In her review for the New York Times, critic Maya Phillips noted that Moxley’s “shrewd caricatures of these supposedly respectable doctors feel justified, audits of their toxic psychology.”
Other works like Emma Sheanshang’s The Fears and J. Giachetti’s Relapse: A New Musical have focused on people processing the chaos of their lives in the context of group therapy. Sheanshang’s semiautobiographical play centers on a group of seven individuals who meet once a week at a New York City Buddhist center. Like so many therapy plays, it’s set “in the present,” as if to wink at its audiences’ concerns. Each session begins with someone striking a singing bowl—a cue to silently meditate for a few minutes. The gong is then re-struck and members of the group bow toward each other as they proceed to “touch in” about their weeks. In a recent phone conversation, Sheanshang told me that what appealed to her about Buddhist therapy, as opposed to other forms like talk therapy, is that “it’s an imaginative sort of meditation, where in the in-breath you take in suffering and on the out-breath, you give someone something that can help.” In The Fears, that imaginative work moves from considering one’s own suffering to that of others. At the end of the play, the facilitator Maia asks the group to “think of someone who has hurt us…let’s think what they might suffer.” For Sheanshang, being asked to adopt someone else’s perspective “takes things to a different level than simply talking about your life” or panning for epiphanies. The immediacy of theater also “allows the audience to go through a kind of group therapy in the same moment as the actors.” The silences threaded into her play, she told me, are intended to hold space for the audience to reflect on their own suffering—and the suffering of others. Imaginative work thus becomes moral work.
Annie Baker’s Infinite Life, which debuted at the Atlantic Theater last year in a coproduction with the National Theatre, was another play that cast a net into the waters of therapy. Five women, ranging from middle to retirement age, are gathered in a fasting center in California where they spend their days filling in coloring books, reading, sunbathing, and gossiping. Several chaise longues span the length of the stage, and the semi-recumbent position (or perhaps the ubiquitous green juice) induces the women to open up and take turns acting as one another’s confessors and analysands. (The doctor who is supposed to be ministering to them is mysteriously never seen or heard from.) The women all have their own reasons for being there: Sofi (Christina Kirk), the central character, is taking a sabbatical from her marriage after her husband discovered some NSFW voicemails his wife sent to another man. Yvette (Mia Katigbak), the fasting center’s quirky spokesperson-in-waiting, has a list of medical ailments as long and complicated as the human genome yet retains a sunny optimism about overcoming her maladies.
If the world outside the center, full of soul-sucking jobs, mortgage payments, and colonoscopies, relegates women of a certain age to the margins, the center provides a space for the women to be what poet Lisa Robertson has called “improductive”—a woman who “neither begets nor works, but drifts.” (One inspiration for the play’s setting is surely Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which Baker has called her favorite novel and which concerns a character who takes up residence at a tuberculosis sanatorium though he is not afflicted with the disease.) With Sofi, who complains of constant fatigue and the inability to orgasm without feeling pain, Baker seems less interested in probing whether her pain is “real”—or real enough to merit sympathy—than in exploring the talking cure in all its improvisatory glory. Merleau-Ponty once wrote, “My spoken words surprise me and teach me my thoughts.” The characters in Baker’s play, too, often seem to be surprised by their thoughts, which move unimpededly through a web of free associations. Infinite Life derives its poignancy from watching the characters progress from emotional nescience to self-understanding in each other’s company. You could choose to see it as theater, a form of therapy, or something in between.
In contrast to the reparative aims of The Patient Gloria, The Fears, and Infinite Life, some musicals have taken a decidedly relaxed or cavalier approach to dramatizing therapy and its discontents. A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond jukebox musical, is shakily built around what the show conceives as a series of unfiltered conversations between Diamond (Mark Jacoby) and his therapist (Linda Powell) that come across as a travesty of the patient-therapist dyad. The questions that the therapist lobs at Diamond are less provocations to insight and more an excuse for the present-day Diamond to relive the highs and lows of his life, as a younger version of himself (played by Will Swenson) regales the audience with greatest hits. Whether the show portends a trend of more commercial Broadway shows jumping on the therapy bandwagon remains to be seen.
Giachetti’s Relapse was another ill-conceived effort to bring therapy to the masses. Set largely in the spartan recreational room of a behavioral ward, the musical portrays a psychiatrist (Troy Valjean Rucker) as he purports to teach his patients how to navigate the dysphoric feelings stirred by “faceless intrusive thoughts.” The patients include a woman diagnosed with borderline personality disorder who may or may not have killed her father and a dancer afflicted with schizophrenia. Rounding out the cast are a nurse and an unruly cohort of anthropomorphized ids that goad the patients to quarrel with themselves and each other. Handled well, the gimmick of externalizing thoughts or alter egos can make legible a character’s inner life (see Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical A Strange Loop, which fractalized the main character’s thoughts). But in Relapse, the disembodied thoughts welcoming the patients to the “wasteland”/“slum”/“prison” of therapy flatten the characters, turning them into marionettes of their “intrusive thoughts” rather than the other way around. A segment that unironically bills itself as a crash course in “Psych 101” introduces the patients by their diagnoses rather than by name. As the thoughts assume greater agency, the patients become deracinated creatures: more chalk outlines than characters. Even the most unconvincing or downright offensive renderings of therapy onstage prove that theater has taken a therapeutic turn.
Or more of a therapeutic turn. Some of the oldest plays, from Oedipus Rex to King Lear, continue to be produced partly because they drop a rope ladder into our unconscious, allowing us to make fleeting contact with ideas too taboo to thrive in the open air. The present-day renaissance of therapy theater, then, reflects a zeitgeist that is at once contemporary and eternal. That theater answers to a hunger for immediacy and connection is perhaps ultimately an instantiation of another Freudian principle: the repetition compulsion. As the Talking Heads might say, “same as it ever was.”
- Nirmita Panchal et al., “The Implications of COVID-19 for Mental Health and Substance Use,” KFF, March 20, 2023, https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/. ↩︎
- We’re nowhere close to the vanishing point of therapy plays; next month sees the premiere of someone spectacular, a play by Domenica Feraud at the Pershing Square Signature Center, about members of a therapy group whose counselor is in absentia. ↩︎
