Ahead of rehearsals for the world premiere of The Scenarios, Studio’s Literary Director, Adrien-Alice Hansel, spoke with playwright Matthew Capodicasa about the day job that sparked the play, the craft and disorientation of acting, and the weirdness of training people to remember each other’s humanity. The following is an excerpt of that conversation, edited for clarity and length.
Adrien-Alice Hansel: Where did this play came from?
Matthew Capodicasa: I had a day job working for a social services agency in New York City as an administrative assistant. I’m not a social worker; I did Excel and set up training rooms, but nothing of actual power. The agency did a bunch of things, including running continuing education for social workers through their training wing.
They also had a contract from the NY Police Department to do what’s called CIT, or Crisis Intervention Training, and the idea is to give police officers a crash course on the signs of mental illness so that when what the MPD calls an EDP, an Emotionally Distressed Person, and talking with officers saying things like, “If someone is having a kind of psychotic break, screaming at them to comply is not going to produce a result of compliance.” Offering the kind of vocabulary officers can use. One statistic that the organization would share was that the biggest provider of mental health services in New York City is Rikers’ Island.
So the training itself was in the mornings, when the social workers would do a traditional didactic PowerPoint and in the afternoons, they would bring in actors who would roleplay with the cops. They have book of scenarios organized by disorder, and the actors and officers would get a prompt and go from there.
And I noticed a few things. The trainings themselves were in that uncanny valley, and also kind of moving in a way that everyone was on best behavior. So if you sit there in one of these role-playing moments, you watch and give over to it and think, “This could work; these trainings could work. They care.” And they definitely did. And with the scenarios, you really get the sense that they’re all in it together, they’re like a troupe. But of course they weren't.
There was an imbalance of experience, the actors are acting, the cops are acting as well, but the cops are cops. So it’s weird because there isn’t really the sense of risk to the cops, so who knows how they’d really respond under actual conditions, because there's no risk in the training scenarios.
I also started to interact with the actors a little and learned that a lot of them gravitated toward this job because they had some sort of intersection with one of those worlds, either the criminal justice or the behavioral health world themselves, or they knew someone who had, a family member or something. They had some skin in the game.
So it was one of those rich spaces where people have competing needs and wants, which is always very interesting. And then you had the kind of theater actor stuff on top of it, which felt evocative.
The play is not a soapbox play; it’s ultimately more a play about the strangeness of pretending to be other people, and the added strangeness of having to prove your own humanity to another human, as well as the effects and the cost of coming up with that proof.
Adrien-Alice: Because the play is in part about the cost of pretending.
Matthew: But also the power there.
Adrien-Alice: Yeah. It lives in a space of ambiguity; we have to believe that the actor is pretending so that the audience’s reality does not break and plausibly also so your brain as an actor does not break.
Matthew: This pops up in a lot my work a lot too—the idea that we’re all going to engage in a kind of shared artifice, that we’ll know is artifice, but we’ll still truth and kind of emotional catharsis through this artifice. I actually think it's in literally most of what I write. Inevitably, there's some point where somebody pretends, even if we all agree that we're pretending.
Adrien-Alice: Ha, well, my next question was whether you see continuity between The Scenarios with your other work or if this play feels like a departure for you?
Matthew: Well, yes. There’s continuity and I think one thing that scares me about this play is that it’s pretty much straight naturalism. There’s something weird going on, but the container is naturalistic, and there’s nothing, nothing to hide behind. Usually my work has some kind of heightened element, some sort of genre element. In this, we’re in naturalistic scenes for 85-90 minutes, even though within those scenes, there is acting going on.
Adrien-Alice: Right. No one is technically possessed, but there are scenarios who tell you who you are.
Matthew: You channel something else in.
Adrien-Alice: One last question, which is of course easy and straightforward: What do you hope people are thinking about when they leave The Scenarios?
Matthew: I mean, I hope that they walk away feeling moved by the human stuff that’s happening on stage, and the thing we talked about, the cost of pretending. I also hope people are thinking about the lengths, the twisty lengths, we go to as a society to justify certain choices we make bureaucratically. We seem to have agreed as a society that policing as it is is a necessary thing—well, not everyone, but as a society we haven’t been able to escape it for better and for worse. So you put silly extremities, the actor stuff that gets put on top of that as an attempt to justify certain choices that the State makes that says it's doing on behalf of a population. But maybe society hasn’t quite confronted the realities of what the state apparatus will and can do—this play isn’t dystopian, but it does feel dystopian to me that we have to have a training to remind people who have control over human life that humans are…humans, right?
And like I said, it’s not a soapbox play, but we are asking humans to both submit to and enact this form of law enforcement that requires a strange set of cognitive dissonances. And maybe people can match the emotion they feel for people in the play with people in real life, who have those experiences. That would be a success. I'm making it sound very political now. I hope that, I mean, I guess it is like there's no avoiding that.
Adrien-Alice: I mean, it’s asking us to examine power in a space we’ve convinced ourselves we don't have to look at.
Matthew: Yeah. That's another thing that theater can do right, which is to make the invisible visible for a little while.