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Reviewed by:
  • Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, and: The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy
  • J. L. Murdoch
Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing. By Jodi Kanter. Theater in the Americas Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007; pp. xi + 230. $37.50 paper.
The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy. By Robert J. Landy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; pp. xx + 277. $49.95 cloth.

Two seemingly unrelated books openly acknowledge the link between physical action and emotional change, noting the working relationship between performance and emotional healing in ways seldom explored. In Performing Loss, Jodi Kanter approaches the topic from the standpoint of her classroom and her performative work with students through community organizations, while Robert Landy, in The Couch and the Stage, writes from the perspective of a clinician introducing and arguing on behalf of the use of action therapies in formal psychoanalytic practice. [End Page 223]

As Kanter introduces her book, she looks into the expanse where the World Trade Center once stood. From this vantage point, she remarks on "our inability to mourn collectively in America" (1) and notes that "very little has been written still about how we ought to negotiate these experiences collectively and in public" (4). One of the challenges in creating better responses to loss as communities, though, is that often we must first rebuild a lost sense of the community itself (5). Creating the climate in which to move toward regaining that lost element and navigating some of its most profound moments are central to this text.

Before delving into the heart of her material, Kanter thoroughly reviews the ways in which performance artists, playwrights, novelists, and theorists have dealt individually with the subjects of loss and grief. These varied treatments of such weighty material stand in virtual isolation, however, within the cultural context of our country's inability, even refusal, to acknowledge varied types of loss and to grieve openly. Kanter's efforts to create a climate of community do not come with concrete or scripted answers to the stated needs of the nation's general public. While she does reference certain groups that tend to do a better job at acknowledging and mourning loss, she does not build a model of an ideal based on their characteristics. Instead, she deftly utilizes a variety of rehearsals to facilitate the discovery of a range of meaningful responses to loss. Kanter prefers the concept and term rehearsal, because of its emphasis on "the extent to which the value of performance lies primarily in the safe space it affords one to practice, to experiment, to try things out and try them on, to become more experienced, and in that sense (and perhaps in that sense alone) more proficient" (26–27).

Each chapter is titled for and rehearses a different element relevant to loss: grief, adaptation, community, responsibility, compensation, and even joy. Throughout each discussion, the notion of rehearsal gives permission to author and readers alike to continue with the revision process in order to develop further strategies. In her own work of performance and adaptation, Kanter frequently comments on what she would do differently in the future or ways in which the project could be enhanced or modified to greater effect. With regard to the written works of others, she comments on the revision process that not only rehearses words and their relationships, but also involves its own process of loss. In particular, she mentions the public way in which Tony Kushner has revised Homebody/Kabul. Kanter explains several ways in which the work has been modified and suggests that the running time of the most recent revision is evidence that the script is perhaps still not quite finished: "the history of Homebody/Kabul opens the possibility that the professional theatre might also become a place to revise and 'redo.' The promise of Homebody/Kabul is that contemplation, interpretation, and action can all become places of connection, where the meanings we make of loss are neither private nor permanent" (145).

In a thoughtful and deliberate effort to encourage not only dialogue, but more importantly action, Kanter opens her book to...

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