Ask the Playwright Ep. 1

What is the question at the heart of this play?

The central dramatic question is a pretty simple one: Are people truly capable of change?

The participants come into the therapy sessions mostly wanting not to change. While their reasons differ, their positions are clear: they do not think they did anything wrong during the regime (or at least that’s all they’re willing to say out loud). The possibility that they have actually done something wrong, whether on purpose or on accident, and the knock-on effect possibility that their choice, their action or inaction, indirectly or directly caused harm, makes them feel deeply uncomfortable. So they try to avoid acknowledging their feelings, because acknowledging that they feel, say, anger, or shame, or fear, would require them to then ask why they feel that way, where that feeling comes from. And then they’d have to acknowledge that they maybe did do something wrong. Which is a hard no for each participant, for different reasons.

The therapist, on the other hand, comes into the sessions wanting to help, and then, increasingly over the course of the play, force the participants to change. He knows exactly what each of them has done wrong: what they chose to do or not do and how that choice to act or not act caused harm of some kind during the rule of the regime that fell prior to the beginning of the play. He wants, he needs them to understand the role their feelings play in their actions, acknowledge their shame, their fear, all of it, confront what they did or didn’t do, take real accountability, and then hopefully be more capable of moving forward and becoming healthier, more trustworthy members of the society the new administration is trying to build. Why he needs this so badly and how he deals with his own feelings are the frantically beating heart of the play.

But there are some other dramatic questions simmering under the surface of the central question. The therapist thinks he just wants / needs the participants to acknowledge what they’ve done, to take accountability and apologize. But what is accountability, even? When he does finally get his apology, it’s like………….oh no, that did not help, that did not solve anything. What now?

So: Are some things unforgivable? How do we deal with unforgivable things, both as a society and as individuals? Is true justice ever actually attainable? What does that process look like, what does the success or failure of that process look like? How do we know we’re doing it right? What are the consequences of doing it wrong?