Staging Schizophrenia: The Workman Theatre Project and Terry Watada's Vincent

Staging Schizophrenia: The Workman Theatre Project and Terry Watada's Vincent KIRSTY JOHNSTON For a lunatic is also a man that society does not wish to hear but wants to preventfrom uttering certain unbearable truths. Antonin Artaud (137) Mental illness has a long and varied cultural history, in which theatrical representations have played an important role, reflecting dominant cultural perceptions but also constituting them. As a result, it is important, when investigating mental illness representations onstage, to ask questions about context: What cultural norms and forms do plays reflect or interrogate? Who creates mental illness representations and how? Who performs mental illness and for whom? Vincent is a play about schizophrenia written by Terry Watada, The Workman Theatre Project (WTP), a Toronto performing arts company that develops work on mental illness, originally commissioned and produced the play to be part of a 1993 provincial conference investigating strategies for handling mental illness in a post-institutional era. The company has since toured and remounted Vincent over ten times. Most recently, in May 2002, it was performed at Ottawa's National Arts Centre and, in March 2003, at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre. Vincent has been the WTP's most enduring and most often performed production. Founded in 1988 by former psychiatric nurse Lisa Brown and incorporated as a non-profit charitable organization in 1991, the WTP has developed an important body of work and pioneered inclusive processes for exploring mental illness on stage,' Operating out of the Joseph Workman Theatre, attached to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the company has created over twenty theatrical productions, organized an annual film festival, and recently hosted the first international Madness and Arts World Festival. In part, the company provides the opportunity for people who have received mental Modern Drama, 47:I (Spring 2004) I14 The Workman Theatre Project and Terry Watada's Vincent t t5 health services and have an arts interest to become involved in theatre. The membership includes people new to theatre, as well as those with significant professional training and experience. All of the company's main productions have been developed with the equal participation of theatre professionals and company members. Members are active at all levels of the company, receive training, and engage in various aspects of productions. They act, build sets, participate in workshops, stage manage, and take on technical and administrative duties. Another aim of the WTP, however, is to educate and engage the public about mental health issues and concerns. While Vincent considers the problems of schizophrenia and of social responses to the illness, other productions have explored such themes as cross-cultural understandings of mental illness, changing connections between the city and the asylum, and depression and the use of anti-depressants. In each case, the company has tried both to challenge stereotypes or common misconceptions of mental illness and to raise public awareness of the difficulties facing people who live with mental illness. Most of the WTP's works have relied on innovations in form to give audiences a direct experience of some aspect of mental illness or stigma. The central formal innovation of Vincent is the liminal presence/absence of the play's eponymous protagonist. Vincent, a man diagnosed with schizophrenia. At no point during the play does he appear onstage. In various post-performance discussions , this aspect of the play has attracted considerable interest and provoked audience discussion. Attending the October 7, t997, production of Vincent at the Workman Theatre Project, for example, I heard post-performance panellist and community-outreach worker Bob Rose note regretfully that the audience never heard from Vincent but "again heard only the voices and words of others." Correcting Mr. Rose, an unknown audience member pointed out that, although Vincent's character was never visually present onstage, his character could be heard in the production's voice-overs. In a sense, the truth of both assertions points to a central tension underlying Watada's play: Vincent 's simultaneous presence and absence, his known and unknown character. In Vince1lf, Watada develops a strategy for representing schizophrenia that emphasizes the border between Vincent's presence and absence. His approach is formally akin to the representational mode called negativity. In...