ABSTRACT
S ince 1996, Newman has written short plays expressly for presentation at American Psychological Association Annual Conventions. The impetus for these “psychology plays” was Kenneth Gergen’s invitation to Newman and me to participate in an innovative symposium he was putting together for the APA’s 1996 convention. Entitled “Performative Psychology Redux,” the symposium was a continuation of a successful experiment launched the year before to expand the narrow limits of the “representations of knowledge” psychologists make use of in talking to each other. Performative psychology, as Gergen uses the term, refers to representations (e.g., statements about the nature of psychological processes) that are simultaneously expressive acts. The symposium offered us a wonderful opportunity. For many years, I had been urging Newman (who had been writing and directing plays since 1986) to write a play with Vygotsky as a central character (he had already written “Outing Wittgenstein”). An APA symposium seemed the perfect venue. Newman wrote the 14-minute “Beyond the Pale” which was performed live as one of four “expressive acts” of Performative Psychology Redux, and I served as discussant. In the play Lev Vygotsky, the early Soviet developmental psychologist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-born philosopher of language (both major influences on our work) are having a social therapy session. Their therapist is Bette Braun, a longtime social therapist and colleague of Newman s (played, in the original production, by herself). “Beyond the Pale” is a performance of their relational activity within social therapy. (It appears in
Chapter 5 of The End of Knowing: A New Developmental Way of Learning, Newman and Holzman, 1997.) The enthusiastic response to “Beyond the Pale” suggested that there might be a wider audience for live theatre/ performative psychology among convention participants. In 1997, the APA ad hoc Committee on Films and Other Media tested this out by sponsoring a session for which Newman wrote another (longer and more complex) play. “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” was performed in Chicago in front of an audience of nearly 450 attendees of the APA convention. As Friedman (1998) has pointed out, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” contains a number off “inside” jokes which require, for full appreciation, some knowledge of history, psychology and philosophy. For example, the “seal car” of the Swiss National Circus in which Trotsky proposes to smuggle Lenin back into Russia, is a pun on the “sealed car” in which the Germans helped to smuggle Lenin into St. Petersburg in 1917. The argument between Vygotsky and Piaget over the name of the street upon which they are supposed to meet-is it “Stage Street” or “Zone Street”?—is based on one of the major differences between them. Piaget’s view holds that human development consists of a fixed set of predetermined stages; Vygotsky held to a more fluid, transformational view, maintaining that human development is a social/ performatory activity with no fixed stages and no necessary limit. The concept of “language games” that Kafka mentions in passing to Wittgenstein is a major component of Wittgenstein’s later writings. Newman thinks of this play (and others like it) as “learning-leading-development” plays, in contrast to Brechtian “learning plays” which offer lessons and construct frameworks for solutions. “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” consisting of philosophical conversations between some of Newman’s favorite thinkers, offers no lessons and certainly no solutions; it is simply a performance of performance.—L.H.
