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FORDHAM CENTER ON RELIGION AND CULTURE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY THEATRE PROGRAM

Religion and Madness: Spirituality and Pathology

Pope Auditorium, Lincoln Center Campus Tuesday, March 2 2010 — 6:00 p.m.

Performances: Fordham University Theatre Program Students

Panel Discussion:

Moderator: Matthew Maguire, Director of the Fordham University Theatre Program

Panelists George Drance, S.J., Actor, Fordham Artist-in-Residence, Contributor to Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors

James Jones, Clinical psychologist and professor of religion, Rutgers University; author of many books, including Religion and Psychology and Terror and Transformation

Julie White, Actress and winner 2007 Tony Award for her performance in The Little Dog Laughed; she has appeared in many Broadway plays and television programs including Grace Under Fire

Welcome and Introduction

PETER STEINFELS: Good evening and welcome to “Religion and Madness: Spirituality and Pathology.” This is a forum organized by the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and Fordham’s Theatre Program.

Two years ago, the Center and the Program jointly organized a forum called “The Wall on Stage” to discuss the dramatic and political aspects of the Theatre Program’s premier production of “21 Positions,” a play written together by three playwrights, an Israeli, an American Jewish playwright, and a Palestinian. We are happy to again be collaborating with the Theatre Program on an equally adventurous subject, and I think in an equally adventurous way.

I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director of the Center on Religion and Culture, and I will soon be turning the evening over to Matthew Maguire, Director of the Theatre Program. First, I would like to ask everyone to turn off their cell phones, car alarms, beepers, or any other instruments that might interfere with the evening’s program. Second, I would like to draw your attention to the index cards and pencils which you can find on your seats. They are for writing questions for the question segment of the program toward the end of the evening. You can write your question, legibly please, at any point in the course of discussion and simply hold up your hand and the student assistants on the side will collect them and bring them forward.

Matthew Maguire heads Fordham’s Theatre Program. As a teacher of play-writing,

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acting, and theater history, and himself a playwright, actor, and twice Obie Award winner for performance and direction. He is also co-Artistic Director of an experimental company that has produced forty-seven original works for the stage. He received his Masters in Fine Arts from NYU’s School of the Arts. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight hand Hammerstein foundations, and many commissions from other foundations, museums, and stage companies. In mid-January, a review of “Wild Man,” Matthew’s one-man play, appeared in The New York Times, declaring to be an “absorbing, buzz-inducing production.” “If audiences go to a theater hoping to be thrilled,” the review continued, “Mr. Maguire goes them one better. He shares his secrets for living a thrilling life and makes most of its joys seem possible for even the generally timid.” I’m not sure how Matthew will feel about my quoting the reviewer’s opinion that “this is the kind of guy you’d love to get stuck with in an airport bar,” but I know that he is the kind of guy perfect for stage managing and moderating tonight’s forum. Matthew Maguire.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Thank you, Peter. Airport bars, I don’t recommend them. Good evening. Welcome to Fordham, to the forum on “Religion and Madness.” We are here to explore the relationship between spirituality and pathology.

First, we will show you excerpts from each one of the four plays of our season, then our distinguished panel will have a chance to respond to what we’ve seen and to add their own observations and questions, and then, we will open to your questions. First, our four plays. Each play of our season explores a different aspect of madness, and each one resonates with a different spirituality.

The first scene is from “The Day Room,” by Don DeLillo. In this scene the character of Wyatt will be played by Patrick Fleury [phonetic], and it has been directed by Jessica Farr. Wyatt is a patient in a mental institution and his ability to speak has failed him. Now he can only communicate as if he is a television.

[Presentation: excerpt from The Day Room]

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: The next scene is from Emily Mann’s play Mrs. Packard. It’s about the true story of a 19th-century American reformer, Elizabeth Packard. Elizabeth was confined to an asylum by her husband, the Reverend Theophilus Packard, because she disagreed publicly with him about their religion. Elizabeth will be played by Kiki Adami, Theophilus will be played by Adam Blodgett, and the women of the asylum will be play by Elana Hines and Claire Rose Malone. The scene was directed by Holly Hughes.

[Presentation: excerpt from Mrs. Packard]

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: The next scene is from Sarita, a play with sons by Maria Irene Fornes. Set in the South Bronx in the 1940s, Sarita follows a Cuban-American teen-ager whose obsessive love for the wrong man leads her to a final act of madness. Sarita will be played by Rebecca Ballinger and Julia will be played by Thomas Pasinka [phonetic]. This scene was directed by Kate Ganon [phonetic] and will be accompanied by the production’s music director, Julianne Wick Davis [phonetic]. [Presentation: excerpt from Sarita]

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: The final play of our season in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It will open in April, to be directed by Eva Patton. The production has not yet begun rehearsal, so our scene tonight will be read. Hamlet will be played by Mark Machieski [phonetic] and Gertrude will be played by Liz Andwartha [phonetic]. The scene is directed by Dan

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Durkin.

At this point, Hamlet has confirmed his belief in Claudius’ guilt and is confronting his mother in her bed chamber. The ghost of his father has just entered and urges Hamlet to aid his mother with her “fighting soul.”

[Presentation: excerpt from Hamlet]

PANEL DISCUSSION

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Thank you. I’d like to ask all the actors and our music director to come out for a bow. [Curtain call by student actors]

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: I’d like to invite our illustrious panel to the stage. Our first speaker tonight is Father George Drance of the Society of Jesus.

GEORGE DRANCE: Thank you, Matthew. It is indeed an honor to be here this evening.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Let me introduce you. I know that all that’s needed to introduce a Jesuit. I know there is over 400 years of history. But I’d like to say a little bit more about George because he is one of our own and we are immensely proud of him. He is an Artist-in-Residence at Fordham, where he teaches acting as well as the senior seminar “Theatre Creativity and Values.” He has performed and directed in over fifty countries on five continents, from Honduras to Kenya. He has acted with the Metropolitan Opera, the Public Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Project, and La Mama E.T.C. With La Mama he has toured Europe and Asia, performing in Andre Serban’s epic Fragments of a Greek Trilogy. His performance as Jason in Medea was singled out by The New York Times. Regional acting credits include the American Repertory Theater and Boston’s New Rep Theater. Collaborating with award- winning composer Elizabeth Suedos on Calderon de la Barcas’ La Vida es Sueño, Auto Sacramental, he translated the 1677 script with Alfredo Galvan, directing its English- language premiere at Marquette University and again at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He has been a guest artist and lecturer at Columbia University, from which he received an MFA, Cornell University, Marymount Manhattan College, and Boston College, and has served on various panels including the USEA think tank for Jesuit High Schools in the 21st Century and New York City’s Roundtable for Arts and Education. He has been on the faculty of the Marist International Center in Nairobi, Kenya, and at Red Cloud High School on the Oglala Sioux reservation.

He also directs retreats exploring spirituality and the arts, co-authored the book Ritual Plays with Father Bob VerEecke S.J., and his “Reflections on Prayer” are included in the new book Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors. He is the Artistic Director of the Magis Theatre Company and his production of the fifth- century Indian classic Shakuntala and the Ring of Recognition, which finished its run last week at La Mama, was praised in The New York Times as “imaginative and delightful.” Father George Drance.

GEORGE DRANCE: Thank you very much. It’s indeed an honor to be here with such distinguished company and discussing such a fascinating topic, and to be a part of this coming together of these three perspectives — the psychological, the artistic, and the religious. If we look at how these questions of madness and spirituality are looked at in our own culture, perhaps the predominant way that we look at reality today is through a

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lens of empiricism, relying on sensory evidence to frame our reality. If that which appears to us seems to go against what can verified empirically, we tend to reject it or dismiss it.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead criticizes this world view that breaks things down in this manner, reducing experience to “sense data.” He, rather, finds meaning, not in the various data that can be verified by the senses, but by looking for reasons for their compresence, their being together in this particular way at this particular moment. To Whitehead, a nature that finds no aim or reason for this compresence is a dead and lifeless nature. In fact, if we were to reject all that could not be verified empirically, we would reject a major portion of our everyday experience, things that have to do with emotion or intuition or in the case of faith revelation.

So in our culture we find ourselves mistrusting these unverifiable aspects of our lives — imagination, emotion, intuition, and revelation — and these are precisely the places where religion and madness play, in the imagination, in our emotions, and in our intuition. Some people reject these altogether. Most of us pick and choose what we hold onto and what we dismiss.

In an empirical context, religious experience would seem to be one of the first things put on the chopping block. We become aware of religious experience in our emotions and its insights come to us through imagination, intuition, and revelation. However, the sheer unverifiability of these things seem to place it totally in the scope of the irrational, and one definition of madness or insanity is the willing assent to what we know to be irrational. It is for this reason that some people would consider any form of religious experience as madness.

However, to those who look to understand religious experience, it’s not that the irrational portion is glossed over, but it’s actually a recognized fact that religious experience is outside the modality of the rational. Rather than branding it as irrational, however, another way to think of it is super-rational or meta-rational. And yet, this equation of religious understanding with madness is not something new. We must remember that many of the prophets were considered mad, and in fact Christ himself was thought by some to be a madman. In the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel, after Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who willingly lays down his life for his sheep, the crowd says of him, “He is possessed by a demon and a madman,” using two words in Greek, daimonon (possessed by the demon) and meinomi, which is here something that goes against the rational. It’s the same root that we have for “maniac” or “mania.”

This verse uses a kind of poetic doubling to emphasize the totality of this rash judgment against Christ, but it in fact demonstrates the predominant two ways that madness is named in the New Testament. Each of these names for madness, daimonon and meinomi, has its own accompanying theological thinking. I’d like to use these two as a frame to consider the scenes that we just saw this evening. In some instances, the madness presented is judged because of its deliberate rejection of what the status quo considers to be rational, and in other instances the madness of these scenes has to do with a kind of fragmentation of identity that happens when the self is displaced by something external. Meinomi, going against what is rational, is a kind of internal disposition, and deimonion, as a kind of possession or an invasion of the self by something external.

These ideas are interesting to consider, particularly when we think that many shamanistic religions categorize religious experience as an opening up to the presence of some

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representative of the spirit world. In the Greek world, the word deimon, or demon, is used by Plato, Herodotus, and even the playwright Euripides, to describe a divinity, albeit somewhat minor deity, between the humans and the gods. And similarly, ancient Greek religion gives us the idea of enthusiasm or being entered by a deity, very much along the lines of how in the Phaedra Plato describes the trance of the Oracle of Delphi as “divine madness.” In the Judeo-Christian context, the idea of a demon or an evil spirit having some kind of possession is a malevolent governing spirit that displaces our own freedom, shackles us to a force that limits our own will.

Conversely, a mystical experience or true communion with God is an experience of something other than ourselves which transcends the self while preserving the self. Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text The Idea of the Holy describes mysticism as a relationship between the numinous holy other, described as the mysterium tremendum, and the individual. Otto says that the mystic desires not only a relationship with the divinity but in fact identifies with the divinity. Edouard Récéjac speaks of mysticism beginning from an experience of a universal and invincible domination which then becomes a desire for a union with that which dominates us in this way.

And Augustine in The Confessions describes this experience of the self and other when he says, “What is this that gleams through me and smites my heat without wounding it? I am both ashudder and aglow, ashudder insofar as I am unlike it, aglow insofar as I am like it.”

In a sense, these views of madness that we’ve been considering really have everything to do with relationship — right relationship with God, right relationship with society, right relationship with myself, my own identity, referred to by some philosophers and theologians as being the same as myself.

So if we were to look at some of the plays that we just saw these excerpts from, in The Day Room thematically the author throughout the play is dealing with appearances. Not everything is as it seems. Each character is revealed to be an imposter. The hospital room becomes a motel, the motel becomes a hospital room; appearances are fluid and they change back and forth. In the scene we saw here, there is an inherent confusion in communication, a search for words, a desperate attempt to express words, but only able to repeat words that have another context. Here we see this identity of Wyatt as fragmented and, in a sense, it’s appropriate that he acts as a TV, because if we were to turn our own televisions on and change the channels, much as Wyatt changes from moment to moment, we understand that our own cultural identity is perhaps fragmented just a bit — the fact that each of these things exists in parallel universes that come crashing together through the accident of our own television.

In Mrs. Packard we see another kind of madness, where she is judged mad simply because her thoughts go against the thoughts of the status quo. She is seen as intentionally going against what would seem to be the rational, the Calvinistic thought of her husband. What happens, ironically, in this scene is the one who judges is in fact revealed as the one who is fragmented. Though he condemns his wife as insane, he still seeks out her advice. He asks her because he has completely lost himself. He has objectified her and sees her as only something that ought to have its own existence in relationship to him and not to have its own freedom.

In Sarita we see a very, very complex fragmentation that is really exemplified beautifully by this set on stage — a hole that has a hole, something that once could have been something together but is now displaced and put apart from the place where it belongs.

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Sarita seems to be this way throughout the whole play, looking for validation outside of herself, looking for externals, looking for something in cards or in relationships or in this particular love which she does not even understand, this abusive relationship which puts her out of relationship with herself, so much so that she is actually fragmented from her own desires and her actions have nothing to do with her desires, saying that she loves him but killing him, not realizing the consequences of her own action.

It reminded me greatly of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s play The Serpent, in which when Cain kills Abel, the first murder in the world, the chorus says “And it occurred to Cain to kill his brother, but it did not occur to Cain that to kill his brother would mean the death of his brother.” Very often, when we are distanced from ourselves or when we are distanced from our true identity, we have no idea of the consequences of our actions, and we certainly see that in Sarita.

In the Hamlet scene, perhaps it was served best as a reading and not as staged because as a reading we don’t know if Hamlet’s father is really there or not. It seems to be validated in the first part of the play by other people who see the ghost. Here in this particular scene there are any number of ways where it could be played. Priscilla Smith, when she played Gertrude, tells an interesting anecdote of the ghost of Hamlet’s father being someplace on stage where he wasn’t supposed to be, so when she turned around he was only one foot away from her instead of five feet away from her, and she could do nothing but scream and then say, “I see nothing, I see nothing, I see nothing.”

So the question of reality, the question of appearance, the question of ourselves in relationship with others, in relationship with God, all of these come into play in this idea of spirituality and madness. The idea of madness terrifies us, and yet it always brushes up against us. We are exposed to it every day. We may not know how to define it, but, to borrow a phrase from the stage director Anne Bogart, we can point to it when we see it.

But what is it that we really see and how does our own situation determine the judgments that we make? Theater, perhaps as teatron or “seeing place,” is perhaps a perfect medium to examine these questions. As Aristotle points out in The Poetics, it’s an imitation not of things but of actions, and as such it can allow us to consider the consequences of these actions without having to commit them or suffer them in our own lives. MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Our next speaker is Dr. James Jones. Dr. Jones is a clinical psychologist and an authority on comparative religion. He teaches courses in religion and clinical psychology at Rutgers University, he is a lecturer in psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College. In addition to his current positions, Dr. Jones has been invited to lecture in Europe and various parts of the United States on the psychological roots of religious terrorism.

Dr. Jones is the author of eleven books and more than twenty professional papers and book chapters. His most recent book, Blood that Cries from the Earth: The Psychological Roots of Religious Terrorism, Oxford University Press 2008, discusses a groundbreaking approach to understanding terrorism. Dr. Jones.

JAMES JONES: I’m so glad not to be talking about terrorism. Thank you, Matthew, and also thank you to Peter and Margaret Steinfels for inviting my wife and me here and for their gracious hospitality. Good evening to all of you.

We saw Sarita a couple of nights ago, and I’ve read the other plays and saw Hamlet many times, so I have some familiarity with the plays. That’s what I’m speaking from here. I

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have three brief things that I want to say.

First of all, the categories of madness and psychopathology are culturally constructed, and we ought to keep that in mind as we go through this discussion. Is it madness to encounter the Blessed Virgin Mary? Is it madness to be aware of the presence of and converse with a beloved spouse or parent who died recently? Is it madness to pray for a sick person with the profound expectation that they will recover? There was a time when those practices were common, and they still are common in parts of our world today.

Forty years ago, the local friendly shrink was taught that such things were signs of illness and required medical intervention. Now the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the sort of hallmark of how to make diagnosis, writes, and I quote here: “Hallucinations may be a normal part of religious experience in certain contexts” — a profoundly confused and confusing statement. So, given that diagnostic categories have a sort of cultural construction to them, I was wondering how might I diagnose Sarita if she appeared in my office about six months prior to the final scene. An obsessive personality disorder? A case of the inter- generational transmission of trauma? — those of you who saw the play know what that refers to. A case of Freud’s Electra Complex, looking for a father? Or a normal adolescent reaction potentiated by peer pressure and a lack of social support? Sarita’s case and Mrs. Packard’s story, it seems to me, illustrate my point about the social construction of diagnostic categories.

Second, religion has traditionally contained a lot of madness — and I mean contained in a positive psychodynamic sense. It has kept madness in a safe container and enabled rather disorganized persons to function even creatively. We might think about Saint Theresa perhaps.

Now, perhaps, that container has been broken. One question I want to raise —and I think this is something similar to what Father George was saying — is to raise a question about the extent that that religious container has been broken, to what extent does theater now contain that sense of our madness? Perhaps these plays illustrate some of the ways that theater can be seen as a container of madness in the contemporary world.

But there’s another point, just a footnote here. It’s interesting to me how spirituality and religion are portrayed in these plays, either as irrelevant to the crisis of life, as was the case with Sarita’s family’s spiritismus, for those of you who saw the play, or as a cause of pathology, as in the case of the Reverend Mr. Packard’s patriarchal Calvinism. What is not shown in any of these plays is what a lot of current epidemiological research shows, that religion can also be associated with significant gains in mental and physical health and well-being.

Third, mental health and pathology, like physical health and pathology, I think exist on a continuum, and a continuum that we all move back and forth along. Under stress and trauma and shock, we may all slide towards the pathological end. If we get enough social support, perhaps even a spiritual discipline, we might move toward the healthy end.

These plays, it seems to me, illustrate that continuum of mental illness. The inhabitants of the day room represent one extreme end. Sarita and Hamlet slide along the continuum, as we all do. Mrs. Packard is clearly at the healthier end, but under the extreme stress of the asylum she too has moments, as we all would if we were imprisoned or, say, in a prisoner of war camp, of slipping into pathological states. But taken together, I think these plays illustrate the continuum that is mental health.

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Two responses to Father George, to have some discussion going here. I think it’s striking that all of his examples about the analog between madness and religious experience were taken from the ancient world. This is an analog that I want to resist, frankly. Today we have a clearer understanding of mental illness and it’s easier to make a differential diagnosis of mental illness and religious experience. Of course we can’t do it perfectly, but we can do it much more clearly, and I think the analogy breaks down.

Also, he said Sarita didn’t know her own desire. She loved Julio and killed him. But it seems to me that’s the human condition, that we’re all creatures of conflict and our desires are conflictual, and that is not unique to Sarita.

I will stop there to make sure that we have time for questions and comments and cries of pain and outrage and whatever my remarks may have provoked. Thank you all very much.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Thank you, James. Our next speaker is Julie White, actress, star of stage, TV, and screen. She hails from Texas and is a graduate of Fordham University. She has taught workshops for our theatre students. Julie has appeared in countless productions on the New York stage, including many plays by her friend and collaborator Theresa Rebeck, including Spike Heels and the solo Bad Dates, which Rebeck wrote for Julie.

In 2006 she received rave reviews for The Little Dog Laughed, playing the role of Diane, a movie agent with a scathing wit. For this she won a 2007 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. I want to mention that the other nominated actresses were Eve Best, Swoosie Kurtz, Angela Lansbury, and Vanessa Redgrave.

She had a leading role as Nadine in the TV hit Grace Under Fire, and appeared in Six Feet Under as Mitzi Dalton Hutley, the hilarious and rapacious owner of a funeral home conglomerate. Other TV includes Law and Order, Desperate Housewives, and Cavemen.

JULIE WHITE: I’m exhausted.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: In 2008 White received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her role in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of From Up Here. Last summer I watched her play Shia LaBeouf’s mother in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, while I was in Rome. She was incredible, running from the hostile transformers, supporting her son Sam — but she was dubbed. It was a bizarre experience listening to someone else’s voice come out of Julie’s mouth, perfectly dubbed in Italian.

JULIE WHITE: Really?

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: She was still great. But I definitely missed what The Times critic Ben Brantley described as Julie’s “mesmerizing rapid-fire rhythm, which suggests an Uzi with a velvet muffler.” Fortunately, she is not dubbed this evening. Julie White.

JULIE WHITE: Oh good Lord! I can’t believe you would quote The New York Times. If we believe good reviews, we have to believe bad ones. So it’s best to never read them at all. I’m representing theater, which you said was a great container of madness, and I’m here to say absolutely it is.

You [to George Drance] are just a Jesuit. You are so prepared. You had footnotes. Good Lord! I’m really intimidated.

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I recently this summer had the good fortune to do Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the park. It was kind of revisiting Shakespeare from college, which I hadn’t done for a while. And we got to see a little bit of Hamlet tonight. That play, and all of Shakespeare’s plays, the comedies and the tragedies, start with a world that has fallen out of balance, and by the end of the play he brings you back to balance. In the tragedies somebody is going to die, but it’s balanced and the world is back the way it should be. In the comedies, the lovers find each other, the correct lovers are put together, and everyone trips off deliriously happy and restored.

I was thinking about it. Life as we know it, to me — at a certain age, you know, your cat dies or something and you realize, “Oh no, I’m not going to make it out of here alive. I’ve got this whole universe, this incredible thing, this place where I live, and I’m just going to leave? How can this be so?” I think that religion is our way to make some sense of it, to give it a greater purpose, to give us a feeling that this little finite bit of time that we all have can’t possibly be all there is.

This summer I also saw Dionysus, and the Greeks — boy, those gods were mean! If you did something wrong, the gods would come and poke your eyes out and cut you limb from limb — play’s over, bye, the end. It seems to me that the Judeo-Christian God gives us a God that sort of maybe cares about us and is going to lead us out of the chaos of what is going to happen into some sort of control. Theater is a place where people keep telling that story. But it’s important to remember that the people who tell the story, playwrights, are people, and their madness pops up in their plays all the time.

In these two cases [Mrs. Parker and Sarita], the two women that we saw who were “mad,” one was being extorted and raped and the other one was imprisoned falsely by her husband. So wonder who’s driving those women crazy. Hmmm. Emily Mann, as we know, is a playwright with a tremendous humanist and feminist agenda. She was, I think, using that story of Mrs. Packard to illuminate an unfairness in the world and try to bring it to balance.

Sarita, poor gal. I thought it was so interesting that she is unable to admit her — it’s rage and anger that could be to blame. If I were an actress coming at it, it’s her rage and anger at this mistreatment by the society she was born into, the men that have all the power over her. She can’t even admit it. So she has to, even while killing him, say, “I love you, I love you, come back to me,” even though she really wished him dead to the point where she killed him. That would be the big action in that scene, I think.

I don’t know. What is Don DeLillo saying about the world in that piece? I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts and comments on that. I was never a Catholic, even though I went to Fordham. I’m a terribly lapsed Baptist. I would be kind of one of those people who say that sometimes religion seems to be the root of a lot of evil in the world, especially religion like Mr. Packard had, that said “my religion is the box in which you have to live, and if you’re outside of my box then you are damned.”

Your terrorism has a lot to do with — I’m sorry, we won’t make you talk about terrorism tonight. But yeah, it’s all religious terrorism. Whether it be Timothy McVeigh in the United States or someone blowing themselves up in a marketplace in Iraq, it’s someone who is so pathologically insane about the superiority of their religion that they believe that murder or imprisonment or burning ladies at the stake is acceptable. So hmmmm, hmmmm.

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But the theater is a great place. There are dramatic stories and it’s very thought- provoking and terrific to play — difficult to play. I’ve played people that were real messed-up people, and it does kind of get to you. When I played Sally Bowles, I drank a lot of gin. So characters do follow you home a little bit. So I am madness in the theater here on your panel.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Great. Thanks, Julie. As a way of moderating the conversation tonight, I’ll pick up on Julie’s question, starting with Don DeLillo and the place of spirituality in DeLillo’s universe. Those of you who are DeLillo fans know that, even though DeLillo is a Fordham graduate and often quotes Jesuits in his books, he assiduously avoids spirituality in this play. I imagine that we might ask the question: Are we watching the consequences of a world devoid of any spirituality, and is Wyatt attempting to seek a different kind of spirituality, especially his imagery of the eclipse, when he’s staring into the sun or talking about others staring into the sun?

With Mrs. Packard, I think the spiritual element of that play is the central argument between Elizabeth and Theophilus is Elizabeth doesn’t believe in a God who could damn the majority of the universe. In Sarita, even though Sarita is suffused with religion — not only the Catholicism of the house but there is a worship of Oshun in the figure of the Virgin Mary where they bring food offerings and dance to her — even though Sarita begs God to take this longing away from her, he does not. So it asks the question: Why?

With Hamlet, I think there is a spirituality that emerges as Hamlet decides to surrender himself to providence, with the moment “let be.” So there is a spirituality in each of these.

James, you noted that perhaps they didn’t all address the brighter side. Of course, theater is always a way of trying to excavate crisis.

So my question to each of you is: Are madness and spirituality conjoined, are they cousins? Even, say, with DeLillo, if it doesn’t appear to be there, is it present in its absence?

GEORGE DRANCE: I think they are certainly very, very close because of how we experience them. And again, we experience them through imagination, through intuition. We experience them in our emotions.

How we harmonize these things with the rest of our lives I think is part of the answer to that question. I’m thinking of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, when she’s talking about her voices, and her accusers say, “Your voices are in your imagination,” and her response is, “Yes, but where else does God speak to us if not in our imagination?”

Which brings me to something within the Jesuit tradition, the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, that says that every movement that we have within ourselves must be confirmed, that not every movement comes from God, and that we have to understand that there are certain ways that we must test the movements of our imagination of our intuition, of our emotions. The things of the heart need to be tested and need to be discerned.

It’s with kind of an ongoing awareness, an ongoing attention to the implications of these things, how they are confirmed in other experiences, how they harmonize or don’t harmonize with the rest of our lives, that the pattern of God’s activity or some other activity is revealed.

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JAMES JONES: I’m very resistant to this notion that, as I said before, madness and religious experience are such close cousins. The inhabitants of the Day Room cannot function outside of a relatively confined space. They would have trouble walking across the street out here and not getting hit by a bus.

People who have religious experiences use those experiences in a way that is creative and constructive and tend to be functioning at least as well, if not better than, the average person.

Now, that raises an interesting question that those of us who have worked in mental hospitals think about sometimes, which is: Can a person who is genuinely crazy also have a genuine religious experience? That’s a very complicated question I think. But if you look at the hagiographic tradition in the world’s religions, I don’t see anything that I would think of as diagnostic as psychosis of schizophrenia or anything like that.

And you say, “Well, it’s because they both function in terms of the imagination.” But the imagination is an essential part of all of our knowledge. When Newton is sitting there pondering about what keeps the planets in orbit around the sun, and the story which I think is apocryphal in the history of science, but still that an apple falls off a tree and hits him on the head, and he says, “Aha, the same force that causes an apple to fall off the tree is the same thing that causes the planets to stay in orbit around the sun.” My guess is that is something not exactly intuitively obvious. This is a tremendous imaginative leap.

Or Einstein gets up one morning and looks in a mirror and says, “If I was traveling at the speed of light and looked in a mirror what would I see?” If somebody came up to me on 60th Street and said, “If I was traveling at the speed of light and looked in a mirror what would I see?” I would say, “You’re going to see the inside of my office here.” [Laughter] But out of that tremendous imaginative leap — I mean Einstein says scientific theories are the free creations of the human mind. They’re like writing a poem or a symphony.

So imagination is fundamental in human understanding. Yes it’s there in religious experience and yes it’s there in madness, but it’s also there in all of our forms of understanding. So I don’t think that’s a very good bridge between madness and religious experience.

JULIE WHITE: The imagination?

JAMES JONES: Imagination, yes.

JULIE WHITE: I guess I would have to agree with you, because as an artist I use my creative imagination — it’s my main tool that I work with — to fully imagine myself having a real experience in an imaginary situation night after night and saying the same lines basically.

JAMES JONES: And certainly as a psychotherapist I have to imagine myself into the shoes of my patient. I have to be able to see their life as much as I can from the inside.

GEORGE DRANCE: Then how do you determine the difference between hallucination and vision?

JAMES JONES: I would make a differential diagnosis between hallucination and vision partly — William James said you know these things by their fruits.

GEORGE DRANCE: Quoting the Gospel.

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JAMES JONES: Quoting the Gospel, yes exactly, that’s right, that’s right. But you asked as a psychologist: if it functions constructively in the person’s life, if it propels them into a kind of spiritual transformation in which they become wise and more morally sensitive and so on and so forth, then I think there you say, “There is the grace of God.” If it turns out that they are having trouble recognizing their family members and they can’t get across the street and they can’t hold a job and all those things, then you say it’s psychopathology.

JULIE WHITE: Does it serve to take you towards disorder and chaos or does it serve to take you towards wholeness.

JAMES JONES: Exactly.

GEORGE DRANCE: Which is exactly the point I was trying to make with the spiritual exercises, which Ignatius talks about as a way of ordering the soul, a way of allowing ourselves to sift out and to test, precisely in the same method that you are talking about.

JAMES JONES: Yes, exactly.

GEORGE DRANCE: I didn’t mean to put imagination in the jailhouse. I simply was saying that it is the realm in which these things function as intuition and as these other places. And yet, I don’t think we can deny the terror and why we have such a poverty of imagination as a culture right now. I think people are terrified of the imagination because of that. I think artists —

JULIE WHITE: In what way do you mean? I’m not sure what you’re saying.

GEORGE DRANCE: I’m thinking of Peter Viereck’s poem “Kilroy,” in which the spirit of the adventurer is always going out — “he was there, he was there, he was there.” Then the last line of the poem is “and in the suburbs Kant sat down and cried.” I think that we experience that. We experience a kind of smallness on the average scale. Now, someone with your experience and, happily, with my own theatrical experience, I think we can understand this, and we can understand where the imagination is a playground and a wonderful place. We do trip and fall sometimes in the playground. But I think some people are so afraid of tripping and falling that they just never enter it. That’s a hyperbole of course. Of course they do enter it, but I think they are fearful of entering it.

JULIE WHITE: This has come to me as we were talking: The religious experience seems awfully similar to the madness of falling in love. There are a lot of plays about that as well, and they’re fun to be in. But it’s a different kind of divine madness.

I think that when you talk about maybe a dearth of imagination, I do think culturally now there is a fearfulness of connection, that it is harder and harder for people to make some sort of connection, which makes it to me so insane to not allow people who want to get married to get married. I don’t get it. Why would you want to in the first place? But if you do, then go ahead, be my guest. But yes, I wonder, do you find — I mean love can be — there are probably quite a few plays about love driving people mad, mad for love, and Sarita — that could be sort of a — but you said it was her family or family of origin issues.

JAMES JONES: Well, I said that as a hypothesis. I’m not really thinking of her as a patient except in very rhetorical sense. But I do agree with Father George. I certainly see many patients who are very much afraid of their feelings and very much afraid of their emotions and very much cut off and live entirely in the head and then wonder why they

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become symptomatic in all sorts of ways. So I do think it’s a cultural type, I agree with that, and I think that is clearly a problem psychologically as well as spiritually and so on and so forth.

JULIE WHITE: So living up in your head can sort of drive you mad, which is one way to play Hamlet completely: he has completely lost his mind because he’s thinking, he has gotten stuck up in his head, and then finally it comes out in this insane way.

JAMES JONES: I’ve forgotten who said this — it’s one of those things I wish I had said — he said there’s two ways to go crazy: you can go crazy by losing your reason and you can go crazy by losing everything but your reason. The sort of psychopathology of the culture we live in is, I think, going crazy by losing everything but our reason.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Can I ask a question about ecstatic states? After I saw Transformers in Rome, I went to see Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa — what a sculpture! Bernini has imagined Saint Theresa in the moment being suffused with Christ. Her face, her countenance — she is out of body, she has been transported.

I appreciate the distinction between vision and hallucination being the result, but I think, whether it’s an act of imagination or a possession, when one is transported, when one is out of self, I think one is in a territory in which the boundaries of the divine and the mad are very blurred. I don’t know that when you’re out there you know where you’re going to come down.

James, I understand exactly why you think they’re not close cousins, especially because we don’t want to romanticize the conditions of mental illness. One of our reasons for doing a season in which madness is a thread is to put light on the subject in the most therapeutic way possible.

But could anyone speak to Saint Theresa? Does anybody know that Saint Theresa knows where she is going when she is lost?

JAMES JONES: I don’t know whether she knew where she was going when she was lost, but she had enough, to use a psychological term — she had enough ego strength, she had enough fundamental sanity and cohesion, to use the opposite of the term Father George used — she had enough self-cohesion and enough ego strength that she could take that experience and she could come back. It seems to me that is a — A person I think of in this context is the psychiatrist Carl Jung, who if you read his Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and his experiments with the unconscious, you think — and there are certainly people who don’t like Jung and don’t like Jungians who say, “Well, he was just nuts.” I don’t think he was nuts, and I think one of the reasons he wasn’t nuts is because he had a tremendous amount of self-cohesion and ego strength and he could use that experience in a constructive way.

I would say the same thing about Saint Theresa and her ecstasies, and anybody’s ecstasies, that they’re not mad or psychopathological, in part, because they have enough ego strength and they have enough self-cohesion that they can use those very powerfully charged experiences in a way that is constructive and creative and transformative and so on and so forth.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: But as it is happening how does one know where it’s coming from?

JULIE WHITE: There is no way to know. I mean like the Buddha under the Bodhi tree,

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like what happened to him there. What is enlightenment? What is that moment when you are no longer confined? Like we’re all so separated from each other? He was suddenly opened up to the whole big picture for a minute, as I understand it, and came away able to continue on. What he saw from that is that the right way is the middle way, is the balanced way, which would be a very strong argument against religion and madness. It’s just like let’s stay in balance instead of ecstatically one way or the other.

But his experience — I don’t know, I’ve not seen that statue — I think his experience was very still. He’s not like a Sufi, he didn’t spin around or anything, he just sat there.

GEORGE DRANCE: I would say that I agree that in the moment we very often have no idea where it is coming from. I think that is why it is important to suspend judgment of the moment, to suspend it until it has been confirmed, until it has been put up against other moments that have some enlightening things to say about that moment, that creates a context for it or creates a path for it. I think the more we bring that kind of awareness, then the more we find it easier to begin to sift through them for ourselves.

One of the things that I love about Elizabeth’s transformation in Mrs. Packard is that things really begin to solidify for her when she is put in the eighth ward and when she chooses to care for the women that are there.

JULIE WHITE: Service is the way.

GEORGE DRANCE: Absolutely. And I think that that for her becomes the testing ground between her faith and her husband’s faith, that her faith does have fruit, her faith does something, and her husband’s faith really only brings destruction.

JAMES JONES: I think that’s exactly right, that you don’t know in the moment and you have to take the risk. To use an example from another creative sphere, which was once a part of my life and hasn’t been for many years, which is writing poetry, you start down that road and, at least in my experience, you don’t know how it’s going to come out, you don’t know whether you’re to come out with a poem that you never show to someone or send off to get published.

JULIE WHITE: And sometimes does it just feel like it’s crying out of you?

JAMES JONES: Yes, exactly, that’s right. But you don’t know until it is done. If you stop in the moment and say, “Is this going —”

JULIE WHITE: You blow it. I’ve had performances like that.

JAMES JONES: So you have to be willing, it seems to me, to keep faith with the process and see where it comes out. I think the same thing is true about religious ecstasy.

Again, one of the things we are forgetting here is that there is a social context. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the Ignatian exercises, where you have a spiritual director and you have a whole context and a lineage and support. So you’re not just flying out there on your own, and it’s not like taking LSD or something on your own at a bad party or something like that. So the social context, to go back to a term I used earlier, serves as a container, which also helps the person come back from those experiences in a way that channels — at least potentially channels — them in a more constructive way.

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MATTHEW MAGUIRE: So I’m hearing a consensus among the three of you that a difference might be the psychological resilience of the person who receives. So the person who would end up in an institution would be that person whose psyche was fractured and whatever higher energy is soaring through them shatters them. And then, in hindsight, we say, “They were ill.” But we don’t question what they might have been receiving. We normally look at that as pathological, whereas it might have been other. That’s not a question, is it?

JULIE WHITE: Not really. Are you saying like that kid who gunned down people at Virginia Tech, he heard voices that told him to do it? So you’re saying that maybe the voices — he was clearly an out-of-balance person. So you’re saying the messages could have actually been holy in nature, like out-of-body, like miracle voices, but he misinterpreted them?

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Right.

JULIE WHITE: I don’t believe that.

GEORGE DRANCE: That brings up the question of: Is evil a privation of good, an absence of good, or is evil an active force? That’s a huge theological question. If that is the case, are there forces that masquerade as good, are there evil forces that act upon us and masquerade as good?

JULIE WHITE: McDonald’s. GEORGE DRANCE: But what a mask! [Laughter]

JULIE WHITE: What do you think, Doc? Do you think there are evil forces masquerading as good out there, some of them former Texans really from Maine? [Laughter]

JAMES JONES: I’ll say one thing about religious terrorism, which is that one of the things that when I teach about religious terrorism that my students find hardest to understand is that people have committed the most horrific actions in the name of their highest ideals.

JULIE WHITE: Yes.

GEORGE DRANCE: Absolutely.

JULIE WHITE: I agree. I don’t think there’s evil. I think there is misguidedness, I think there is out of balance. I don’t want to believe in evil. I believe we’re good. I believe we’re basically all good.

GEORGE DRANCE: I want to believe that too, and I do believe that. I wonder, though, sometimes can I hold the person who falls away from goodness solely responsible for that, or are there other things involved that I just don’t understand?

JULIE WHITE: I think so often it is — I mean as an actor I always am an advocate for my character, even were they to do something that was — like if I were to play a woman who drowned her children in the bathtub, say, I would figure out why I did that and then as I played her I would find some positive choice, like I believed for some reason it had to be done, to try to understand that person’s pathology — because of course she didn’t want to drown here children, and if she came back to balance she would just be horrified,

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mortified, that she would do such a thing. It is my hope that if people have gotten so far out of balance they can’t understand or comprehend the consequence of their actions that if they could be brought back to balance they would see and recognize and repent, to use a word from your language, darling.

JAMES JONES: Psychologically, one of the hardest things about being a psychotherapist and being an expert on terrorism is to continually make the point that to understand an action is not to condone it. I have worked in a prison, I have worked in a maximum security prison. Exactly like what you said, I would want to understand why the person did it. But that wouldn’t mean that I am going to condone it.

JULIE WHITE: It doesn’t mean it’s alright. But you sort of start to — that fabulous movie Dead Man Walking with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, where he just commits a heinous crime, and she comes in and ministers to him and comes to feel for this person and feel bad for them that they are so out of balance and they’re never going to get back, they’re going to be just killed and that will be the end of them. That’s a great movie, if you haven’t seen it, about madness, because he is clearly mad.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: I’m receiving a vision. The questions that represent the collective wisdom of the room have arrived.

JULIE WHITE: Oh boy. Thank you. Hallelujah!

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Our first one is: “Could you define ‘religious experience,’ because as you address these issues tonight it sounds as though some are saying there is no longer in our day and age a healthy, good role for religion? So can you define religious experience?”

GEORGE DRANCE: Well, Rudolf Otto would define it as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans [“fearful and fascinating mystery”]. He would say it is —

JULIE WHITE: God bless you.

GEORGE DRANCE: I think he does. The great mystery which somehow causes us to tremble but also draws us to become one with it.

I think any kind of experience of the transcendent in relationship with myself is perhaps how I would consider religious experience. If I were to speak about it particularly in my own frame, I might use language that others might take issue with. But I would say that yes, it is really —

The second part of the question, I think there are a lot of people that simply find religion irrelevant today. I couldn’t imagine a life without faith, I really couldn’t. Cardinal Suárez says to be a Christian is to live one’s life in a manner that would seem — I’m getting the quote wrong — foolish without faith. In that way, I think, we witness the fruits of our religious experience, the fruits of the transcendent, the fruits of being called out of the littleness of myself.

JULIE WHITE: But why is it necessarily religious? Like when I swing along Highway 1 and am confronted with the grandeur of the Pacific Ocean right before I get to Big Sur and I am filled with this amazing feeling of joy and smallness and largeness at the same time and so blessedly happy to be alive at that moment, that doesn’t really involve God or Jesus, it involves the world I live in and the rightness of the moment and the feeling of being part of a universe, and it doesn’t involve in any way a thing where I feel I’m going to

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heaven but you believe differently so you’re not.

GEORGE DRANCE: I don’t know where that’s coming from. [Laughter]

JULIE WHITE: I mean that would be my deal with religion. If we define religious as spiritual, I believe in a spiritual experience because that involved my spirit, I think, but it didn’t involve a doctrine.

GEORGE DRANCE: I would say that that was Theophilus’s religion and not Elizabeth’s religion. But I don’t want to say, “Elizabeth, you can’t have a religion because you’re not Theophilus.” I want to say that she can have a religion that embraces all of that as part of God.

JULIE WHITE: But you were saying that it doesn’t seem relevant today. Certainly in the —

GEORGE DRANCE: No, no, no. I was saying there would be some today who say that religion is irrelevant. That’s all I’m saying.

JULIE WHITE: Okay, cool.

JAMES JONES: The second part of that question was about there’s not a place for religion in the present time, or something like that.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Because as you address these issues tonight it sounds as though some are saying there is no longer in our day and age a healthy, good, helpful role for religion.

JAMES JONES: Well, I hope, if somebody heard me say that, I appreciate the chance to correct it, because I certainly don’t think that is true. I think quite the opposite.

I mean, look, sociologists talk about what they call “secularization,” which is the marginalization of religion in culture. We can debate, and they debate, about whether that has really happened. But there is a sense in which — and this goes back to something I think Father George was saying at the beginning — all of us have been recruited, quite without our consent, into a huge social psychological experiment, which is: Can human life flourish without a sense of the sacred or a sense of the transcendent? I think the results show up in my office all the time [Laughter], and they show up on the TV all the time, and they show up in the kinds of problems that I have to deal with as someone who deals with terrorism all the time.

Carl Jung, who I mentioned in another context, said, “The gods have died and they show up in the doctor’s office.” I think that’s exactly right. So the idea that — if somebody heard me say I don’t think there is a positive role for religion in our culture or in human life, then, please, I thank you for the change to correct that because that’s the opposite of what I think. I’ll leave aside — well, no. Let’s go on to another question. I have something to say about why it’s religion, but —

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: This is a related question, and I think there’s a harmony here: “Given theater is a fusion of two different realities, the sense data provided by sound, light, movement, and actors and set, and the ‘spiritual’ reality of what is created, can you see a sacramental element in theater at its best?”

JAMES JONES: One of the things I was thinking about in sort of thinking about this

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whole thing was the connection between theater and liturgy. I thought about maybe saying something about that, but decided not to.

But one of the things — this is not about madness; it seems to me this is about sanity — is that the juxtaposition is about living in two worlds at the same time. I think the religious or spiritual person is a person who lives in two worlds at more or less the same time, the ordinary world of sight and sound and matter and space and time, and also a sense of the sacred or the transcendent or the mysterium, or whatever word one wants to use here.

Like liturgy, I would say that theater does represent that capacity to take the ordinary — to use an example that I suspect will work here at Fordham University — to take ordinary bread and wine and make them vehicles of something transcendental, or to take ordinary words or ordinary actions or ordinary print on and page and make it a vehicle of something — yes, there is something sacramental about that.

One of the things I think it involves is a kind of juxtaposition and a kind of dual consciousness, which is in fact analogous to what goes on in theater in exactly the way that the questioner points to.

JULIE WHITE: It also requires a good, peppy, snappy audience. So when you all show up to go to the theater, you’re a big part of the way that the performance goes. But yeah, having performed a lot, I’ll have shows where it starts happening and we’re having this experience together, that is amazing. And because it is live, it is only going to happen that once. It goes away, and people come up to me, “I was at that show, that was so amazing, I felt like you were talking to me,” and I have been at shows where I just get overcome with something.

You know, it can be such a great — having been raised in the Baptist tradition, it’s just such a tent meeting — you know, like “Whoa, I’m healed!” It really can do that for you. I just think that’s the great thing about theater. Is that religious? No. Is it spiritual? Absolutely.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: I agree.

GEORGE DRANCE: Peter Brook calls those “moments of communion,” and in his Essay on Holy Theatre he speaks about those moments exactly as times that we are kind of cheering together, but also the moments that we are silent together.

JULIE WHITE: Oh, you feel it like — it’s an animal in the room when everyone is like “Ah!” together.

GEORGE DRANCE: And I think that the sacramental nature of theater is certainly in that. The religious tradition of sacrament is something that goes beyond the doors of the church. I think true religion recognizes that sacrament goes out, sacrament is not contained only within the church. But there are ways in which we are trained to see. I’m thinking of the last act of Our Town, when Emily comes back from her day, her twelfth birthday, and she says to the stage manager, “Do people ever realize life while they live it every, every minute?” His response has two parts. The first part is “No.” The second part is “The saints and poets, they do some,” and he puts the saints and the poets together because, I think, there is a sacramentality to that kind of experience.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: I agree. I think theater is communion. When I first learned as an altar boy about the transubstantiation, I realized that there was a mystic difference

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between the Catholics and the Protestants. The Catholics believe — and it’s a stretch to believe — that the bread and the wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ. I think that’s what happens in the stage. There’s a transubstantiation, that what we put on the stage — it’s just lumber and hardware and, in this sense, Fordham theater students — but, because we believe, it transforms and it becomes the thing itself. We impart in a mystical action. And, as Julie said, it is so important that the audience is here because it is a communal event. So yes, indeed.

Next question: “Why is [the book of] Revelations canonized and not rejected as the hallucinations of a madman?”

GEORGE DRANCE: I would say that we have to understand that Scripture functions in different modalities. If we expect Revelations to function as a historical book, we are deceiving ourselves.

I’d offer just one anecdote about this, and this is my own experience of religious terrorism. After working with the Red Cross for three months after 9/11, coming back from the Armory one night, someone said, “Go by Union Square, it’s so wonderful there.” I had two terrible experiences at Union Square. One was being thrust into the middle of a crowd of two factions screaming at each other, and they are wondering what the priest would say.

The other was being handed a pamphlet by someone who was saying that this was God’s judgment on the sinful New York City. At which point I handed the pamphlet back to this religious terrorist and I said, “Jesus is my personal savior. Jesus has nothing to do with why the towers came down. Jesus has everything to do with what we do afterward.” Then his friend started to talk to me and started chiming in, accusing me of not quoting Scripture.

And then I said, “Well, what about ‘God is love?’ What about ‘as the Father loved me so I have loved you?’”

“Well, what about the two towers in Luke?” they said. “And then in the Book of Revelation —”

I said, “Do you mean to tell me that you are going to take the words of an apocalyptic poem and put them next to the words of your savior and expect them to do the same thing?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

So I finally said to him, “Sir, are you married?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do you talk to your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Do you talk to your daughter?”

“Yes.”

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“Do you talk to your best friend?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you talk to your wife the same way you talk to your daughter?”

“No.”

“Do you talk to your best friend the way you talk to your wife?”

“No.”

I said, “Well, the Gospel and the Epistles and the Book of Revelation are written to as particular a community as your wife or your daughter or your best friend.” He said, “Well, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

I said, “Well, because you don’t want to.”

I think we have to recognize that Revelation, the Book of Revelation, which sometimes is used as an excuse for terror and for fear mongering and for all kinds of ridiculous action, needs to be taken in its context as a piece of apocalyptic literature which was written to a suffering community to give them hope based on the visions of someone who was caring for that community.

If I were to say why we have it in the canon, I would say that’s why, as an experience of a people that through faith endured persecution and came out because of their faith.

To read the descriptions of it, it sounds like madness. But it helped people live. It in its time got people through a tremendous crisis. What we do with it now, that’s another question.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Another question?

GEORGE DRANCE: Sure, do another question.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: “You can have madness without spirituality, but can you have spirituality without madness (super-rationality)?” That’s in parentheses. It looks like super-rationality. But I think the question at first stands: “You can have madness without spirituality, but can you have spirituality without madness?”

JAMES JONES: Yes.

GEORGE DRANCE: Yes.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Care to vote?

JAMES JONES: I think the term “madness” is — this is going to devolve into a semantic discussion too quickly, I’m afraid. You can have spirituality without psychopathology. Can you have spirituality without ecstasy; does ecstasy have to be madness? I would be willing to at least defend the position that you couldn’t have spirituality without ecstasy, without some transcendental consciousness, transformative way of seeing and experiencing, given our culture. Is that madness? I don’t think we gain anything, except for a wonderful evening at Fordham, by bringing the term “madness” into this discussion.

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JULIE WHITE: It is on the brochure.

JAMES JONES: I understand. That’s right. I know. I know that. That’s right. That’s wonderful. That’s fine.

JULIE WHITE: It has a very negative connotation, the word “madness.” But I kind of, being an artist, feel like it’s a good thing. Everybody I know is about half-crazy, and in a good way. So I’m not sure. I may be the one that says you can’t.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: “Art often glamorizes madness. Even religion can either elevate or denounce it in turns. Do we as artists and spiritually compassionate human beings have an even greater responsibility both empathically and socially to demystify madness and psychological illness, to be a part of the cure, facilitating understanding and wellness for people who truly suffer and are often ignored?”

JAMES JONES: Yes, definitely.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: If there is not a long line at the microphone, I’ll speak to that. Going back to Aristotle, who said the purpose of theater is catharsis, I believe that this particular season putting the lens on madness, as we have, gives the audience a homeopathic dose, as Aristotle would term it, of terror and pity, so that we elevate our awareness of the crisis and in that way we leave with a fresher ability to act.

JAMES JONES: I’m not sure that these plays glamorize madness. I thought that was a very searching question. I don’t think The Day Room or Mrs. Packard glamorizes madness, and certainly Sarita doesn’t.

I would hope that one of the functions would be to evoke some compassion, because we are not particularly as a society from my experience particularly compassionate about these situations. But I didn’t experience these plays as glamorizing madness, I must say, in all honesty. But I think when well done — I mean we saw Sarita and we saw the glimpses here — they certainly, I think, evoke compassion and complexity.

That’s the other thing. I’d add a little about Sarita. Her desire was confused. I just think we’re all creatures of conflict, and that’s part of a complex understanding of human beings, that we can want more than one thing at the same time and we can be conflicted. I don’t know that I want to glamorize that, but I want to be empathic with it. I think these plays have that potential.

GEORGE DRANCE: I agree. I don’t think it’s glamorizing it at all. I think it’s presenting it, though, in a context that appears beautiful. I don’t think that’s glamorous. I think beauty is very different than glamour. I think beauty allows us to see, even if what we are seeing is terror, and I think in a very Brechtian way beauty allows us to have an experience but to be able to think about the experience because we finally see the experience.

If we were glamorizing it, it would be asking the audience to have one experience of the madness. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening in these plays. I think it’s opening it up to them to really see it on a variety of levels.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: “Saint Paul tells us that Jesus ‘emptied himself.’ Did he surrender his personal identity?”

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JULIE WHITE: What’s the context that Saint Paul tells us that? I can’t remember my Bible right now.

GEORGE DRANCE: It would refer to the canonic hymn of Philippians, of the Letter to the Philippians. In the canonic hymn it says that Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but rather he emptied himself, giving himself on a tree, giving his life for us.

So I think the question of did he surrender his identity — I think Jesus, and why Jesus is such an important figure, is Jesus completely identified with the Father. So a surrendering of his identity was not an annihilation of this identity, but it was a union of his identity with a trust that the will of the Father would accomplish something even past, even on the other side, of what was that emptying.

JAMES JONES: As I remember, the text goes on to say he took the form of a servant, he emptied himself and took the form of a servant, and that was his identity. Now, someone out there is thinking of a great theatrical quote when they hear me say this, right? Antonio said, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” But I do think that, in fact, that he didn’t surrender his identity. He took his identity, which was the form of a servant.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: “Why do mentally ill and psychotic people often have hallucinations of a religious nature, and how would a psychologist respond to the hallucinations?”

JAMES JONES: Boy,that is a really good question. And let me tell you, you wonder about that, I mean as someone who got training before the advent of heavy doses of psychoactive medications and worked in what I suppose we would now call the eighth ward of Mrs. Packard, or something, the hospital or the asylum that Mrs. Packard was in. Look, I have studied religion, I have also been to theological school, and I never heard as much God-talk as I did in the mental hospital. Everybody was talking about God or the Virgin Mary or Jesus. I learned very quickly that all God-talk is not religious discourse, for sure.

I don’t know the answer to that. I think the obvious simplistic answer is that it has to do with the cultural conditioning from which people come. But I think at a deeper level — and this goes back to something that has been a theme in this discussion — religious language touches us at our deepest level, if it’s really living religion, if it’s not just sort of social convention. If it’s really living religion, it takes root at the deepest levels of our being and is diffused through our life. So there is a profundity about the depths of religious language that I think is sometimes opened up in these kinds of situations.

Now it doesn’t happen so much, partly because we don’t have the hospitals like that and partly because the people who used to be in them are now on heavy-duty medication, and when they’re not then you see them out on the street. Which goes back to my point about how we could use some more compassion here in our society. So I think it does say something about the depths that religious discourse touches in people and breaks open in these ways.

JULIE WHITE: Do you think it has something to do with that the people in those situations are under so much stress that they are reaching for some answer or something? My grandfather had a lot of strokes, and finally at the end he was just like a little bird in the bed. He just didn’t talk and he was on oxygen. But one day he sort of sat up and he looked over in the corner and he said, “Moses, go back.” Like, Holy cow!

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We couldn’t ask him. We wondered. He wasn’t really much of a churchgoer at the end. He said that everybody that was real sure they were going to heaven were people he didn’t want to spend eternity with. [Laughter]

So I wondered if he was seeing Charlton Heston. You know what I mean? Like who was Moses to him? It was clearly like — it kind of felt like he was saying, “Not yet, I’m not quite ready yet.” But I wonder. He was awake there at some point, and he knew — it was really like towards the very last hours or days of his life — that you go to religious imagery for help.

GEORGE DRANCE: For comfort, for belonging, for union.

JULIE WHITE: Yes.

GEORGE DRANCE: I think that is one of the things — the question before was does religion have a function today. I think true religion, good religion, no matter what creed it is, accepts people that society disposes of. We continue to welcome and we continue to see as part of the family some aspects of society that others would rather simply just shut away or do away with. I think religion at its best welcomes and embraces them.

JAMES JONES: Can I add a footnote to something that I said a little while ago, because I was thinking about something that Julie said? I was a little bit flippant, and I apologized. You said, “Well, yeah, but look, it’s in the title of the program about religion and madness.”

I think that that’s in fact something really important about this discussion, which has to do again with a point I keep making, which is the cultural context. To tie a couple of things together here, because I’ve said we live in a culture where the typical psychopathology is you lose everything but your reason and then we push everything that is “irrational” to the margins and lump it together. So both ecstatic religion and madness get pushed to the margins, and so they get lumped together in that way.

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t tell us anything that’s particularly profound about either madness or religion, but it does tell us something very profound about our culture and the way in which we have marginalized both the irrational or madness and also pushed them together on the margins of our culture. So it occurs to us that they occur together, even though I don’t think intrinsically they occur together, but I think culturally, because, as I say, we’ve lost everything but our reason in that sense.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: I believe we have time for one more, so we’ll end with one about the audience: “Please address the experience of the audience — identifying, losing oneself in the character as you watch. Is that a transcendent experience, losing the self for a moment in time? Can that be considered spiritual?”

JULIE WHITE: I hope so. Do you know? Recently I saw this play, actually a few years ago, called Mr. Marmalade, which was a weird play. The protagonist was like a five-year- old girl. She sort of played it like a five-year-old girl. Everybody is really big, and the flowers sang, and Mr. Marmalade was her imaginary friend. As the play went on, you began to see that Mr. Marmalade was not her friend at all, but was like a drug-dealing pimp. And then I realized, “Oh my God, it’s her absent father.” It just hit me. I started to cry so hard, and my hands were shaking, it was such an experience.

I went back to see Noah Haidle, the writer, and the gal playing the little girl. I couldn’t

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stop crying. I couldn’t even quite figure out why. I had to go home and process it a lot, like “What was that?”

It was a wonderfully profound experience — and I didn’t even pay for the ticket. It was fantastic! I can’t tell you. I have that experience a lot, and it is certainly what I am for in doing a show. Let me tell you, even Wednesday matinee I stand back there before I go on and say, “It’s never a burden, it’s always an opportunity.”

JAMES JONES: I was thinking of something exactly like that, Julie, when you were talking about how there is an interaction, relational experience, between the performer and the audience. The audience too has to suspend a certain ordinary state of consciousness and to say, “Yes, these two Fordham students really are a Hispanic girl and her psychopathic boyfriend” or “this person really is back in the 1800s and is in her mental asylum under the worst possible conditions.” But really we know we are all sitting here in the middle of New York City in the 21st century. But the capacity to suspend one’s ordinary state of consciousness in order to enter into the experience of being in the audience I think is an important capacity that does at least interface with the capacity that is necessary to have a spiritual discipline and have a spiritual life and engage in liturgy and so on and so forth.

GEORGE DRANCE: I would say that Peter Brook says in Holy Theatre again that holy theater not only makes the invisible visible but provides the conditions for that to happen. I think that is what really good theater does. I think it is providing the conditions or you to have that experience, Julie, as an audience member and to go home and to think about it and to carry it with you and to be connected to it continually. That’s how art inspires art and inspires action throughout the world.

JULIE WHITE: I am a great disciple of pop culture. I think theater is sometimes rigorous and difficult, and I also think that 81 million people watched that woman Susan Boyle sing “I Dreamed a Dream” on YouTube. And how much did we cry? How moving was that three minutes of whatever?

I think there’s something about this huge dissemination of experience that is a wonderful thing and that unites us as a planet, that we all felt something. When that South Korean girl performed, I feel like that was a performance, what she did in the Olympics, that gorgeous dance, and the miracle of her just channeling all the best that she had to offer, it was thrilling and world uniting.

So in that way I think that the theater of this new world that we are coming up with is maybe tiny, short bites of things, but we are going to find a way as artists to bring it out and make it more. I just hope that. That’s my religion and madness, that theater can make us less divisive and more complete and balanced.

MATTHEW MAGUIRE: Great. Now I will turn the microphone back over to Peter Steinfels.

PETER STEINFELS: Before closing what has been truly an extraordinary evening, I want to announce that the next Center event will be a presentation on May 3rd by Cardinal Roger Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles. He will be speaking on “Our Heritage and our Future: Why Enacting Comprehensive Immigration Reform Is a Moral Imperative,” and then he will engage in a discussion with respondents as well as the audience.

If you wish to receive notice of that and all other Center on Religion and Culture events, please leave your name at the table on your way out. I should mention also that the

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transcripts from all our past events, and eventually from tonight’s as well, can be found on our Web site, www.fordham.edu/religculture.

I also want to announce that you can see the Theatre Program’s production of Sarita on this coming Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The program’s production of Hamlet is scheduled for the end of April. You can find cards on the table on your way out which will give you information about the box office.

Thanks are owed to Eva Patton, Theatre Department Manager; Patricia Bellucci, Program Manager for the Center; all this evening’s student assistants; and of course the young actors and stage technicians for tonight’s performance; and finally, our heartfelt thanks to Matthew Maguire, James Jones, George Drance, and Julie White. [Adjournment: 8:05 p.m.]