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Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)

  • Sarah Busch EMAIL logo and Heidi Lucja Liedke EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 7, 2024
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Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
From the journal Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Volume 72 Issue 2

Abstract

This article examines how theatre works as a form of therapy using Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon. Both depict fictional representations of psychotherapy but also use concepts from narrative therapy as developed by White and Epston (1990), such as the audience as witnesses and creators of their own story. We argue that therapy-as-theatre exerts a pull on the audience, which invites them to empathize, identify and understand, and draws them into the “affective arrangement” of the plays as defined by Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner (2019). The two plays bring together the therapeutic and the theatrical both in terms of content and form: in Every Brilliant Thing, the performer explicitly re-enacts conversations with a counsellor and mimics the therapy setting by sharing with the audience their feelings concerning the suicide of their mother. Similarly, in An Octoroon, the playwright’s alter ego BJJ makes himself vulnerable to the audience. However, the play also confronts spectators with hard truths about the history and topicality of racism that they may not be prepared to hear. Within the specific time frame of the shows, similar to the frame of a psychotherapy session, the two plays create self-contained affective spaces where feelings and emotions circulate between performers, spectators and among audience members.

Keywords: narrative therapy; theatre as therapy; affect; adaptation; audience as witness
Corresponding authors: Sarah Busch, MA, Department of English I, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz 1, 50923 Cologne, Germany, E-mail: ; and Prof. Dr. Heidi Lucja Liedke, Goethe University Frankfurt, Institute of English and American Studies, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2024-06-07
Published in Print: 2024-06-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial
  4. Introduction
  5. The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
  6. Articles
  7. Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
  8. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
  9. Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
  10. The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
  11. Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
  12. Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
  13. Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
  14. Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
  15. Book Reviews
  16. Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
  17. Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
  18. Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
  19. Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
  20. Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2024-2013
Keywords for this article
narrative therapy; theatre as therapy; affect; adaptation; audience as witness

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial
  4. Introduction
  5. The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
  6. Articles
  7. Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
  8. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
  9. Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
  10. The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
  11. Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
  12. Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
  13. Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
  14. Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
  15. Book Reviews
  16. Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
  17. Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
  18. Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
  19. Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
  20. Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
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