There is a voice that rises from the dark side of the mind that can create detours in logic, manipulate fear and snuff out the joy of being. Its silent mental dialogue with the will can be gently persuasive or harsh and demanding.
Psychotherapist Craig Allen of Suburban Psychiatric Associates, Lombard, calls this unconscious dark force The Trickster.
“The Trickster opens up and feeds on psychological wounds. It’s the highly seductive driving force behind all forms of addiction and depression,” he said.
The concept of a mysterious dark force that resides deep within the psyche is not new. Although religious groups often describe it as the evil one, the demon within or Satan, Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist and onetime student of Sigmund Freud, argued that all people have a collective unconscious made up of both life-affirming and anti-life forces. He called the anti-life tempter The Shadow.
When it’s resurrected in the venue of the theater, its machinations are mesmerizing to behold from the safe distance of an audience seat, say addiction-counseling students at the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn. They watched a four-actor troupe perform two plays in June that graphically depicted The Trickster/Shadow’s role in alcoholism and suicide.
Why were the students so riveted during the performances? What made the dialogue so compelling that, when the actors paused, you could hear a pin drop?
The simple answer is authenticity. The students weren’t just observers; they were voyeurs.
The plays are autobiographical. The actors/playwrights are members of the Sobriety Group, an alcohol and addiction therapy group Allen directs. Two years ago they formed a spin-off acting troupe, The Recovery and Beyond Players of Healing Theater Productions, Lisle, to publicly re-enact their real-life battles with The Trickster/Shadow. Allen co-founded the group in 1994, with Jim Keller, Downers Grove, a mental health worker at Columbia-Olympia Fields Hospital.
This is not entertainment theater. This is brass knuckles drama. The ability to digest raw emotion is a prerequisite for viewing.
In the first play performed at the college, “Come Fly with Me,” written by Joe (a pseudonym), 50, of Downers Grove, the lead character, Jim, is a chronically depressed alcoholic. The scene opens with Jim stretched out on a couch in his basement.
Enter The Shadow (The Trickster), played by John Congram, 40, Lisle, who wears his black hat a little to one side, a style that befits his cocky demeanor. His movements are animated as he malevolently tries to whip up Jim’s enthusiasm for an encore of their heavy-drinking, bar-hopping romp a few nights earlier.
The Shadow: “Come fly with me! Let’s fly away. . . . Seize the night. Experience life. Great conversations and companionship await. But only you can make this dream come true. I’m just your guide to paradise.”
Jim: “I’m wise to your shtick.”
Their verbal thrust and parry continues, as The Shadow looks for familiar hairline fissures in Jim’s defense.
Jim: “My nerves always get jangled when I’m not drinking.”
The Shadow: “Hold that thought! Partner, you know how a little heaven’s nectar can soothe those ragged nerves. . . . We can be downtown in two shakes! (In a booming voice.) Seize the night! Jimmy, we’ve been running together for a long time haven’t we?”
Jim: “Yep, over 20 years now. My God, is it 20 years already? Well you always do seem to be hanging around.”
The Shadow plays his trump card; he reminds Jim that with his inhibitions numbed by liquor he easily befriends artists, writers, singers and musicians, people with whom he’d never feel comfortable if he were sober. Jim takes the bait. They exit the stage. The next scene cuts to early morning. Jim has a hangover.
The Shadow: “Yep, you sure seized the night.” With a maniacal laugh, he blows Jim a kiss and struts off stage.
The next play, “Just Another Midnight Dreary,” written by Paul (surname withheld), 45, of Wheaton, is also about a chronically depressed alcoholic. The story opens with the lead character, Jon, played by Congram, talking with his therapist, Chris, played by Janet (surname withheld), 44, of Lisle. Chris informs Jon that she’s going on a sabbatical and refers him to a psychiatrist.
In the next scene, Jon, now despondent, is sitting in his living room. A strange voice emanates from a disconnected speaker phone on a nearby table. The voice is the Raven, a metaphorical Shadow/Trickster patterned on the Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name. Jon and the audience never see the Raven. Paul sits behind a screen on stage and voices the Raven’s 15-minute dialog with Jon as it tries to persuade him to end his life. Jon is no match for the clever bird.
Jon : “Who are you?”
Raven: “Maybe a who, maybe a what, maybe a where. Maybe all of these, or none. . . . I am the essential emptiness of being. I am the black tunnel at the end of the road. I am the maelstrom. I am the abyss. You know me, Jon. I exist in your mind as I existed in Poe’s. Your whole life has been a struggle to deny me. You’ve tried religion, meditation, sex, drugs, alcohol, antidepressants and therapy. . . . Escape the physical being that causes you so much trouble and pain.”
Jon swigs a bottle of liquor and fingers a container of sleeping pills. The room darkens.
During the informal chat session after the 40-minute performance, the actors fielded questions from the students.
“How has acting this out changed your perception of The Shadow?” a woman asked Joe.
“By constantly doing this, when I really do hear that Shadow’s voice in my head, its impact is blunted by the repetition,” he responded. “It’s like hearing the same commercial over and over. After a while it has no effect.”
Another woman commented, “I was just thinking how reasonable The Shadow sounded.”
“That’s part of its lure; it is reasonable and it is very seductive,” explained Allen.
After class, student Kathy Wicevic, 34, of Channahon said she wanted her two teenage daughters to see the plays. “What a wonderful way for them to hear that Trickster voice. Then when they have heard it within themselves, it’ll click.”
Frank Salvatini, assistant professor of human services and addictions counseling at the college, who teaches the class, said the plays nullify the pop culture perception of alcoholism. “They portrayed the alcoholic as an individual struggling to be well, not as someone who’s too stupid to see how much alcoholism is hurting them,” he said.
“Healing Theater takes psychodrama (role playing done in group therapy) to a new level,” said psychoanalyst Robert Moore, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary and consultant to the theater group. “The audience can recognize their own kinship with these issues.”
“It’s a form of passive group therapy for the audience that’s 100 percent credible because it comes from true-life experiences,” said Carol Drennan, drama program director at Willowbrook High School, Villa Park, who coaches the troupe.
The players might never have made their first curtain call if Allen hadn’t acted in and directed plays at his alma mater, Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wis. Although he also enjoyed his work as an extra in the 1988 movie “Midnight Run,” which was filmed in part in Chicago, it was his experience in live theater that gave him insight into the beyond-the-applause benefit an actor gains from a receptive audience.
“When actors are in front of an audience, they experience mirroring, which means somebody outside themselves sees their beauty, their creativity, their greatness, and that vision is then reflected back to the actor,” Allen said. “It occurred to me that in the confines of individual therapy and group therapy, the opportunity to benefit from mirroring is very limited. But if we could somehow expand (the psychodrama) we were doing in the Sobriety Group to the theater, the cast could get a whole lot of mirroring.”
Healing Theater lives up to its title, said troupe members who were interviewed.
Before Joe came to the Sobriety Group 2 1/2 years ago and became sober, he had a 20-year history of depression that he “self-medicated with alcohol.” At first he participated in the theater group mostly to educate others about the dynamics of addiction. He didn’t fully appreciate the payback of his efforts until recently.
“We were scheduled to do a performance, and I felt so down and sluggish and fatigued that I planned to see my doctor soon after we finished,” he said. “By the end of the play, I’d snapped out of it totally. Not just the mental depression but the physiological fatigue too.”
“My alcoholism was lurking in the background my whole life,” said Congram. A divorce four years ago pushed his social drinking over the line, resulting in unemployment, $15,000 in hospital bills for recovery services, and bankruptcy. Today he is a full-time computer programmer, sober two years and a Healing Theater evangelist. “The theater is a form of continuing therapy for me,” he said. “It’s a real ego boost. It helps keep me straight.”
Janet has been sober for 18 months. She wasn’t a problem drinker until 1990, when she fell into a deep depression. “One of the reasons I got involved with the theater was because there is a terrible social stigma against women alcoholics. . . . When I arrive for a performance, people don’t think I’m one of the actors, an alcoholic. They think I’m a therapist.”
Paul, a computer analyst, has suffered from depression since 1970 and is “sober on and off.” When he reads the Raven’s dialog he penned, advocating death as the ultimate mental anesthesia, “I just concentrate on getting the lines right, which keeps me distanced from it; otherwise it would be gut-wrenching.
“I participate in the theater as a reluctant actor. I’m more of a playwright. Somehow writing down your story clarifies your issues. But I want to stay involved with the theater and do what I can. I don’t know where I’d be without it.”
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For information about Healing Theater performances and video tapes of its plays, call Craig Allen at 708-319-8852, or check out its Internet Web page at http://www.xnet.com/htp, or write to Healing Theater, P.O. Box 388, Lisle, Ill., 60532.
