Going the Distance: Trauma, Social Rupture, and the Work of Repair

So much depends, she thought, upon distance.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

There is nothing as vital to the understanding and communication of experience as distance. This statement, on its face, seems to contradict the working process we embrace on stage: as actors, we are engaged in closing distances, in empathic connection, intimate disclosure. For those who feel that the actors' work is to inhabit a character, thinking her thoughts and living inside her skin, "connecting to the character" is virtually axiomatic. But does this hold true when the character is, essentially, oneself? Certainly, theatre that draws on personal story, as does much collaboratively developed theatre, particularly benefits from oscillations between empathy and distance. By both living inside the story and stepping outside of herself, the actor begins to accept inner dissonance and multivalent perspectives. Theatre, which destabilizes entrenched viewpoints, elicits a polyphony of voices, and asks us to inhabit positions we normally eschew, can become a productive vehicle for personal and social change.

Our stories heal us and help us grow. Making theatre from individual life stories can be a powerful tool for shaping understanding. Refracted through the "optics of the theatre," a story may make visible something larger than itself. Collaborative play-making allows us space to distill and reimagine our stories, to move beyond simple reiteration to creative agency. The fluidities and instabilities of performance permit playful interventions that counter the reification of experience. The frozen moment of trauma, in particular, can become unstuck. This is true not only for individuals but for communities as well; the conditions of trauma pertain to communal experience as much as to that of the individual, and play-making is beneficial in both arenas. In all cases, it is the element of distance that permits both aesthetic and therapeutic rewards.

In Aftermath, her book about trauma and recovery, philosopher Susan J. Brison bears witness to the efficacy of telling the tale; by "constructing and telling a narrative of the trauma endured" (in her case, a brutal rape and near-murder), she begins to transform, reintegrate, to once more "feel at home in the world" (54). To speak the unspeakable, to say it in words of one's choosing, and to say those words again and again, is a way to master the trauma, giving memories the "kind of meaning that enables them to be integrated into the rest of life" (54). "Narrative," Brison testifies, "facilitates the ability to go on by opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past" (104). As such, it influences the construction of a meaningful self. However, compulsive retelling, without reformulation, is not enough. Emotional distance— an "engaged disengagement"—is needed if the experience is to yield insight and recuperation. To gain control over traumatic memories, to feel empathy with the traumatized self, a survivor may wish to "rewrite the plot and then enact it" (76).

Brison's insight into the healing power of story illuminates the connections between creative and recuperative processes. In original theatre work, we may rely on the efficacy of telling to reframe and reformulate the past; moreover, one story may become a lens through which we see more deeply into another. The performer, acting as if the experience is in the present, takes charge and acts upon the content of the performance, transmuting what was "there and then" to "here and now." This transformative moment occurs in a liminal space, one enriched by the productive distance between performer and audience, between the raw material of the story and the actor who embodies it.

In this article, I aim to create a framework for understanding how productive distance may be deployed to advantage in theatre developed during periods of social trauma. Through discussion of theatre projects in Israel devoted to dialogue and reconciliation between Arab and Jewish teens, I examine ways that theatre may challenge entrenchment and move participants toward more...