Theater’ helps students interact with community
In rural communities, developing relationships between residents and health care providers is essential in building the trust needed to sustain the local health system. Residents need to know that providers care about them and won’t abandon the community. Providers need a way to hear residents’ concerns and get a better understanding of community values.
Institutions serving rural areas have recently been experimenting with readers’ theater projects as a way to jump-start community/provider dialogue.
Readers’ theater is an inexpensive, fun, and thought-provoking way to get members of a community to interact, says Todd L. Savitt, PhD, professor of medical humanities at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.
"It’s a great way to get small communities to talk to each other and work through issues," he says. "Health care is something we are all affected by. We all can safely have and voice opinions because it affects us."
Savitt started the medical school’s Reader’s Theater program in 1988. His model has since been used by The National Rural Bioethics Project at the University of Montana and a number of medical schools across the country.
Medical students audition each semester to take part in the program, which offers no payment or class credit.
"We take a short story that has to do with an ethical or social issue in medicine," he explains. "We always use good literature. We don’t want stories that have been written for that specific issue. We don’t want a teaching story, something that someone wrote to teach someone about advance directives or something like that. We take stories that are already around."
A playwright adapts the story to be performed by multiple "readers" in a half-hour format. Stories that have been adapted in the past include, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Doctors of Hoyland, Richard Selzer’s Follow Your Heart and A Question of Mercy, and A Face of Stone and The Girl with a Pimply Face, both stories by William Carlos Williams.
The students wear a standard uniform, identical T-shirts, and dark pants or skirts, and they only meet one time together to practice the script before reading the play in public.
"You want to read the story reasonably well, but no one has expectations that this is going to be a theatrical performance," he says.
In fact, all action is left to the listeners’ imagination. The actors sit or stand in front of the audience, reading from the script. If they look up, they look above the heads of the audience, not at audience members or one another, he says.
"It is like reading, in a sense, all action is left to the imagination. But it is a group experience," Savitt says. "The heart of reader’s theater is not the performance, which takes 20 or 30 minutes, but the discussion that follows."
Group reading encourages sharing
Hearing a story as a community of people, rather than reading it to oneself changes a person’s experience of the story, Savitt feels.
"When you read a story, you may think, Wow! That’s a neat story,’ then you put it down. You may mention it to someone else. But it is your story. You have read it the way you want to read it, and no one else has the same experience," he says. "But to perform a story the way we do it, which is taking most of the lines in the story and giving voice to them, hearing it is another level."
The group hears the story and experiences the story together and then discusses it.
"What happens is that the audience members hear each other’s ideas and play off of them," he says. "People hear each other’s ideas and think, Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Or, I completely disagree with what you are saying.’"
The performance stimulates discussion not just between audience members and the readers, but among audience members themselves.
One story, Selzer’s Follow Your Heart, always provokes an intense discussion, Savitt says.
The story involves a woman who witnesses her husband’s death and is then asked to donate his organs. She does, but cannot cope with the idea that in some way, her husband is still alive in the people who now have his organs.
"She has to resolve whether she feels he is dead or alive," Savitt explains. "She argues with her sister about what happens on the day of resurrection. Who gets the organs? Things like that."
Ultimately, the character resolves her conflict by secretly finding out who received her husband’s heart. She goes and listens to her husband’s heart beating in the chest of another man.
"That has generated a range of responses — from She’s loony,’ What a weird story,’ to the exact opposite," he says. "Some people think it is a tender, loving story and a beautiful idea. They think that we should allow organ recipients to know who the donor was, things like that."
The discussions help the medical students understand the values and opinions of different members of the community.
"It’s great for the medical students because they get some idea of the roles they will be playing," he says. "They love it because it’s a way to get out into the community and hear what real people think."
The program gives them the opportunity to "step back" from being so close to the science of medicine and think about the issues involved, he adds.
Target performances to small groups
When he first started reader’s theater, Savitt posted signs around campus announcing the performances — and no one came.
He’s since learned that performing for "built-in" groups, such as book clubs, retirement homes, social organizations, is a better way to schedule performances and to stimulate discussion.
"We try to find groups who are already meeting and that way we are sure to have an audience," he notes.
However, too large an audience can be a problem with the format, he adds.
"We did a performance at the [Augusta-based] Medical College of Georgia, and they had all 600 of their first-year students who were there for orientation come," Savitt relates. "The performance was great, but you really can’t have a discussion with that number of people. Ideally, it is not make for large audiences; it is better with groups of 20-50 people."
Savitt is compiling all of the performed scripts into a book, which he hopes will be an instructional tool for other schools and groups that want to begin doing reader’s theater.
"I have written sort of a how-to for the introduction," he says. "It is basically how you do reader’s theater, I have included explicit instructions, such as when to sit down or stand up, etc. It is my hope that this will expand to other institutions and we will have more community-based reader’s theater.
Sources
- Todd L. Savitt, PhD, The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, Department of Medical Humanities, 2S-17 Brody Medical Sciences Building, Greenville, NC 27858-4354.