Theater

Social workers on stage

By Robert von Stein Redick

Mental health professionals turned playwrights? Is this what Portland theater is coming to?

It is, and the news should be welcome. For it’s a remarkable creative ensemble that’s come together, for the second time in 18 months, to stage The Calling, a play written right here in Portland by a University of New England professor of social work. The Calling sold out for its entire first run (May 1999) at the Oak Street, and drew such praise that the entire original team decided to produce it again, this time at the Portland Stage Company. Michael Rafkin directs the three-person drama, in which Deborah Hall plays a scarred but brilliant survivor of extreme abuse; and Christopher Price and Lisa Stathoplos are social workers, veteran and novice respectively, who learn that some people refuse to be mere “cases,” or to respect the aseptic categories of counselor and counseled.

These four have known each other for decades — Rafkin and Hall are founding members of the Mad Horse Theater Company — but if that’s not cozy enough, the playwright is Hall’s husband, Professor Clay Graybeal. I spoke with Graybeal, Hall, and Rafkin between rehearsals (in a frigid campus basement) Wednesday night.

Q: Your new creative institute is called the Center for the Arts and Social Transformation — a provocative title if ever there was one. Do the arts truly occasion social transformation, or reflect it, or both at once?

GRAYBEAL: We’ve talked a great deal about that over the years. We’re intrigued by the way the arts provide transformative experiences both individually and in social collectives, in the public. After the first production I would have people come up to me, professionals I had known for 10 years, and tell me, “I could never say what you said in that play.” And there’s a growing body of research about how people learn better when they’re exposed to music, how people are changed by witnessing the story of another’s life.

HALL: I’m in the social work field, too. And often times we had people come up after The Calling in tears to say, “Thank you for telling my story.” I’ve lived and worked in the theater since I was 20, from New York to Maine, and I have never experienced people being so moved.

Q: What sparked you to write a play in the first place?

GRAYBEAL: I took a sabbatical and had planned some fairly traditional research. I think I had a lot of frustration about certain themes and issues in my career. And you couldn’t really . . . I mean, there was no way to write a traditional, peer-reviewed article that would say the things I wanted to say. It had to do with professional contradictions and value conflicts, and also just the extraordinary intensity of the stories of clients’ lives.

And one day Deb said, maybe you should write a play. And I just started writing, and it was the most transformative experience of my life. I had no prior training or experience in theater, but I would sit at the screen and the words would form just at the moment I wrote them, almost like I was copying them down rather than writing.

The only thing I knew when I started was that it was going to be about a male social worker who was kind of burned out. And he was going to encounter somebody whose story was so profound and so moving that it would reconnect him with his own humanity, break through all the professional jargon, all the professional bullshit, and he would not be able to look away.

Q: [to Michael Rafkin] How did you get involved with this effort?

RAFKIN: Well, it was unusual. I had just come back from six months in a meditation center in Western Massachusetts. They asked me to read it, and it was one of the best first plays I had ever read. We were all shocked that it was his first.

Q: What is it that excited you first off?

RAFKIN: It was that it was so very heartful. Even now it gets me teary. And doing it a second time is just as rewarding. We’ve been down this road, and the road is only deepening, which, you know, vindicates our first response. Jennifer Casey is just a heartbreaking and courageous character. There are some nights when I just can’t stay and watch certain scenes because they’re so intense. That old maxim, write what you know — well these folks know it all right. Clay just has this gift for getting to the heart of a person’s life.

Q: You’ve known each other a long time. It shows in rehearsal.

RAFKIN: We have. But the situation is always this intimate. It’s a complete illusion that art is not intimate; when it’s not there’s something very wrong. It’s like getting married over and over again.