The Therapeutic Influence on Children of the Play

Children with Emerald Eyes

Directed and acted by Aurelija Gurinavičienė, Žalia Varna Theatre, Lithuania.

The purpose of this report is to present the Incubator Research Project. This project is based on psychologist Mira Rothenberg’s book about children with emotional problems, Children with Emerald Eyes. Two histories from this book were chosen: “Johnny’s Story” and “Sarah.” This project was carried out in the following stages:

  • Theatre lessons for children.
  • Reading and analyzing the histories in the classroom.
  • Observing handicapped children and playing with them.
  • Performing the play for children who are not handicapped and for handicapped children and their parents.
  • Conversations after the performance.

Conclusion: Children can recognize within themselves the feelings and experiences of stage characters and respond to children with emotional problems. Performing and reading these histories encourages children to express and discuss their opinions.

In the early summer of 1998 I accidentally came across Mira Rothenberg’s nonfiction book about extraordinary boys and girls with the intriguing title Children with Emerald Eyes. The author calls children with emotional problems extraordinary. She was born and grew up in Vilnius, emigrated to the United States during the war, and worked as a psychologist. This book is the author’s gift to Lithuania. All summer I kept reading and rereading just this one book. I was unable to read anything else: everything seemed too trivial, too banal. This book overwhelmed me, hypnotized me. It seemed as if I were reading for the first time about matters which were really important to me, about which I had never dared to speak to anyone, as if I had learned the most intimate secrets about myself. “I write about these children because I love them. Out of love I learned to understand them a little, to feel their pain, to respect their efforts, and to admire their courage. Out of love I learned to see their dignity, to discern human beings.

“If one of us is injured or wounded, we begin to build a barrier and thus, as it were, try to protect our wound from further pain. The strength of our walls depends on the scope of the damage. Each child defends himself against fear in his own way, not by imitating someone else. Nevertheless, all of them strive to defend themselves against the same terror – death. I want to tell how by indirect means, like all other children, they seek the love and understanding they desire so much.

“Just as there are millions of souls, there are millions of ways to heal them. From every rift a child can be tempted, drawn, enticed into our world in order to live in it.”

The author clearly identifies the desire of each of us – to be safe and to be loved. However, the children she describes express this need in a strange and, to the average person, incomprehensible way. I would like to briefly relate two of these histories, which became the plot line of this play. For this play I intentionally chose histories with happy endings.

“Johnny’s Story.” Johnny was born three and a half months prematurely and weighed barely 600 grams. He spent the first months of his life in an incubator. At the age of six, with a diagnosis of deafness confirmed by two professors, Johnny does not walk, talk, react to his surroundings, or show any emotions. The psychologist Mira already determines at their first meeting that his deafness is feigned. She gives the deaf boy some music to listen to. When the music fascinates him, the psychologist suddenly stops the recording and says: “That’s enough, Johnny.” The boy shakes his head in protest and at the same time betrays that he can hear. After several weeks of work, Johnny is walking like any child of his age; later, he learns to express his emotions. Johnny is autistic. He does not talk, but he is able to get by through his creative work: painting and sculpture.

“Sarah.” After her brother is born, three-and-a-half-year-old Sarah stops eating the food she is used to, becomes incontinent, is afraid of the mirror, and has fits of hysteria lasting several hours at a time. She constantly demands a “gift” – something wrapped up from her surroundings – and talks to her hand. Her mother wants to have her put away. When she takes the girl to a psychologist, she is already seven. At the end of this story the girl is herself trying to help other children solve toilet problems, has stopped talking to her hand, and has become a charming and well-adjusted person. Now, she is a married woman raising two children.

I had many doubts, but it seemed that I was not the one preparing to create but that this book was creating me. It is risky to write a play for children using such emotionally difficult material. I was tortured by doubt. Would children understand it? Would they find it interesting? Because there was no way for me to escape from the histories I had read, I understood that I could free myself only by writing a play. An excellent opportunity presented itself because at that very same time the Open Society Fund of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture were organizing a contest to write a play for children and teenagers. I won and received support to create the first project of this kind intended for school-age children. This project about fear (that is how I formulated its theme) was to be called The Incubator, but the children almost unanimously decided that the play should be called Children with Emerald Eyes. The creation of this project was also influenced by the theatre laboratory lessons of the Swedish director Suzanne Osten. They provided a stimulus for the structure of this project.

The research for this project was carried out in the following stages:

  1. Theatre lessons for children.
  2. Reading and analyzing the histories in the classroom.
  3. Observing handicapped children and playing with them.
  4. Performing the play for children who are not handicapped and conversations after the performance.
  5. Performing the play for handicapped children and their parents.

The following people took part in each stage of the project:

  1. 14 children aged 11-13.
  2. 120 children aged 14-17.
  3. 5 professional actors and a stage designer.
  4. Actors and children:

a)600 children aged 6-10.

b)750 children aged 12-17.

I would like to describe each stage of this project.

1. Theatre lessons for children.

The preparatory stage was perhaps the longest and most important for us, who were carrying out this project. I invited children aged 12 to 14 from a children’s home. When we played theatre games, everything was fine. However, once we began to read and study the histories of handicapped children, the children lost interest. I was unable to do even one rehearsal with them. They were interested in the theme of love; they told me about their childish fears and their own lives. The actor who participated in the theatre lessons and was to play Johnny refused to work with us on the grounds that this theme was too difficult for children. At that time it seemed I had made a mistake in choosing this material. But our group was unexpectedly enlarged by children from an art school. After being hopelessly stuck, my project moved forward. One boy very accurately described what a child left in an incubator feels. He demonstrated the sounds and movements of a “wounded bird” as described by the author. Another girl admitted that in the morning, before her parents were awake, she talked to her thumb, and so she understood Sarah’s conversations with her hand. She understood Sarah’s craving to get as many gifts as possible and her intense unwillingness to give back to anyone a package she had received. When we tried to rehearse, the girl had such empathy with her role that we even had to stop and remind her that this is only a theatre lesson. She did not want to give back the gifts wrapped during rehearsal: “They’re mine, and that’s it!” During the play Sarah expresses this wish by wearing one dress over another. She gets angry when the psychologist asks her to give them back.

2. Reading and analyzing the histories in the classroom.

We read the histories together with the actress who was rehearsing Sarah’s role. The children witnessed these physical and emotional changes in Johnny: a) dissociated from his surroundings, Johnny sways, does not walk, later takes his first step; b) associates with a lamp as if it were a living person, later pushes it away; c) expresses positive emotions by drawing pictures; d) upon seeing an incubator with a doll inside, separates himself from that doll (the essential break); e) when a puppy dies, bursts into tears for the first time.

The results were very interesting. A class well known in the school for its unruliness listened to these histories with fascination. That they were behavior problems I found out only after the lesson. The children’s great interest in my reading removed all doubts that this material was well chosen. One teacher expressed the wish to include this literature in the textbooks, and the children agreed with her because “this is really interesting!” However, failure with children who do not have families forced me to the conclusion that a child brimful with his own pain and the wrongs of his life has greater difficulty understanding the pain of a handicapped child. And after theatre lessons at a girls’ reformatory I grasped that these girls, who seem almost like girls from so-called “normal” families, differ in one sole way – their ability to fantasize has been killed. They willingly move, dance, and sing but have difficulty responding to intellectual games, especially the kind that we usually call games of fantasy. It is entirely understandable, therefore, that the teachers at the Vilnius School for Special Children want their pupils to see this show.

After listening to these stories, pupils drew pictures on the theme of fear. Some drew the heroes of these stories; others depicted their own fears.

3. Observing handicapped children and playing with them.

Observing these children was a great lesson in life for the actors. Our observations took place at the Child Development Center of Vilnius University Hospital. We met with the children and their parents in the theatre facilities. Children with emotional problems were our teachers. We observed them and admired them. We immortalized their behavior and manner of speech in our show. We selected individual movements and sentences and with these tiny fragments filled in the characterization of our heroes. We did not spare our heroes; we just wanted to show them in the fullness of their feelings: with fear, pain, hope, loss, love, and the joy of new self-discovery. The actors who played the children sensitively got inside their characters and were able to convey not only features of their emotional instability but also of their childlike charm. It is precisely this quality, evidently, that allows audiences, in fascination, to watch their lives on stage. Our rehearsals lasted almost three months. In addition, we were deeply moved because the author of the book, Mira Rothenberg, despite her venerable age of 77, planned to come to our rehearsals. Our first rehearsal with the author almost did not take place. The actors were very excited, and our rehearsal turned into a conversation with our guest. Having understood the cause of our excitement, the author said: “If I was able to understand those children, I will also understand you.” Indeed, her presence was very necessary for us: her way of connecting with people, her language, her unique relationship to her profession, and her tolerance. Despite her age, she had not lost her vitality, feminine charm, or sense of humor. Not only did she tell us about incidents that were not included in her book, but she also helped solve our creative disputes and dispelled our doubts. Indeed, we were amazed by her memory: she remembered all the histories and problems of the children she had met in Lithuania two years earlier.

4. Performing the play for children who are not handicapped and conversations after the performance.

On October 29, 1999, at the Lėlė Theatre, our play had its premiere, at which the author of the book was also present.

This play was not only performed in Vilnius but also visited the Lithuanian cities of Panevėžys, Marijampolė, Utena, and Molėtai. It participated in the festivals of Viltis, an organization for handicapped people, in Kretinga, Klaipėda, and Palanga. The principal of the school in Pagiriai, in the Vilnius district, requested a second performance for the pupils at this school because in her opinion: “This play should be seen not only by all the children but also by the teachers.” The teachers admitted that this play made them think about their relations with children. “We are often inexcusably rude and insensitive toward children,” admitted the teachers.

The integration of handicapped people into society provokes a mixed reaction: some are frightened, others understand that it is necessary. I must say that even the word “psychologist” in the poster for our play scares some teachers. Upon seeing this word, they understand the play advertised as something difficult and unpleasant and, in their opinion, “unnecessary for children” because children “should enjoy childhood.” Others, on the other hand, understood that the play would provide them with material for future discussions with children. After the performance we often heard people say: “Those who didn’t come missed a lot.” This response by the audience not only stroked our egos but also showed that our work was meaningful.

What did the children in our audiences like? First of all, they emphasized that this play was not a little tale intended for small children. They felt that they had been taken into the adult world, where serious problems were being examined. And, most importantly, they understood everything! The older ones, even though they understood that this was only a play, nevertheless empathized with the heroes and experienced a catharsis.

We were also amazed by the attentiveness of rather small, five-and-six-year-old children to the fates of our heroes. After the performance their mothers marveled that these children watched the play so intently.

5. Performing the play for handicapped children and their parents.

When performing this play in various Lithuanian cities, we met with the leaders of Viltis, an organization for handicapped people. Some of them organized performances in their cities for their membership. For people who worked in this organization it was important that our play treated the problems of mentally disturbed children, that these problems were being openly discussed. Our actors were very worried before performances for handicapped people. They were worried that people who had themselves experienced these misfortunes might consider us “imposters.” The spiritual connection that emerged during these performances enabled us to believe completely in the therapeutic power of creative art. We were part of that therapy: at the same time that we gave, in giving, we received its reciprocal effect.

Conclusion:

  1. Children can recognize within themselves the feelings and experiences of stage characters and respond to children with emotional problems (all age groups).
  2. Performing and reading these histories encourages children to express and discuss their opinions.
  3. In evaluating this project society splits into three parts:
  4. Negative: children will never understand this material;
  5. Positive: this material is useful for the emotional world of children;
  6. Doubtful.

I believe that the changes taking place in society will allow us to expect greater awareness and understanding of these problems in the future. The first steps have been taken by our society with great difficulty, but they are important indicators of this change.

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