Readers' Theater
This article describes a program using literature to present and discuss medical issues. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: "Readers' Theater," ECU Report, Spring/Summer 1990, Volume 21, No. 3.
ECU medical students are learning to be compassionate physicians through the use of literature and staged readings, an obscure form of theater.
The concept is simple -- a short story addressing a pressing medical issue is presented by third-year medical students in a staged reading to the public. Each production is followed by discussion between the audience and cast, moderated by a scholar in the humanities.
"We have some heated discussions when people are forced to think about where they stand on the issues and to defend their views," says Dr. Todd Savitt, a medical humanities professor who co-directs the ECU readers' theater project.
"We hope that what readers' theater does is educate the public about what's going on in medicine and make medical students aware of how physicians are perceived by those outside the profession. We think we've succeeded."
The ECU project is one of three pilot programs started last year by the North Carolina Humanities Council.Medical students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University also sponsor staged reading companies.
According to humanities council executive director Alice Barkley, the Medicine and Society Readers' Repertory Theater is the only project of its kind in the country.
"Although a number of medical schools use literature in their medical humanities teaching, and others sponsor professional presentations of plays with medical themes, nowhere else, to our knowledge, have health professionals and students served as performers and engaged directly with public audiences," she says.
In March the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the North Carolina Humanities Council a grant to expand the series. The $75,000 Exemplary Award was the largest of 10 presented nationally.
NEH reviewers labeled the North Carolina program "extraordinary" and commended the council for seeking to promote "interest and build bridges among practicing physicians, their communities, humanities scholars and medical humanities teachers."
The two-year grant, Barkley says, will be used to extend the program beyond university communities to include practicing physicians in rural areas across the states by involving county branches of the American Medical Association and public libraries.
"The pilot projects demonstrated that medical professionals are vitally interested in discussing the issues which were raised through the dramatic reading format," Barkley says. "The interaction between practicing physicians and medical students about the nature of the profession, social expectations and roles and the values which underpin decisions in a medical setting proved to be among the most provocative and penetrating discussions of the pilot projects."
The readers' theater project is already serving as a model nationwide.The ECU group traveled to Washington, D.C., in October to present The Doctors of Hoyland to the annual meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values, a professional organization for medical humanities scholars and teachers.
"We received many positive comments," Savitt says."Several people were so excited that they asked us to make a presentation at their schools."
The Doctors of Hoyland is based on a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and addresses the acceptance of female physicians by patients and other doctors.
Four other adaptations of stories have been presented at ECU since January, 1989, including A Face of Stone and The Girl With a Pimply Face by Dr. William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Ann Porter's He. Health care for the poor, aging in America, doctors as patients and patient-physician communication are some of the topics the presentations address.
"What we're doing is presenting literature to the public and to students," Savitt says."We try to pick good stories written by authors who are respected in their fields."
A staged reading is a very stark form of theater without sets or costumes.Instead of moving about, cast members remain in chairs, face the audience and read their parts from scripts resting upon music stands.
"Readers' theater leaves everything to the imagination of the listener," Savitt says. "What we do here is very much like radio drama."
Third-year medical students are invited to audition for the parts and receive a $50 stipend if chosen. "We were worried in the beginning because only a few students showed up for the first audition," Savitt says. "But on the second day we had 18 or 20. We've been able to double-cast and sometimes triple-cast every production."
Although they don't have to memorize parts, cast members must become familiar with the story being presented and attend several rehearsals.
"The students have to work hard on these productions," says project co-director Dr. John Moskop, an ECU medical humanities professor. "They have to really get a feel for what the author is trying to get across.In the sessions that I've been to, I thought the audience came away with a good feel for the stories, too."
Christine Carter, a student who was cast in A Face of Stone and He, says she is better off for having participated. "It opened my mind to how many different opinions there are out there and how strongly some people feel about issues that I didn't think were very important," she says. "This is an advantage in my training."
Burt Banks says the program is an effective way to ease some of the bitterness people have toward the medical profession. "I've learned from these people how deep-rooted that bitterness is," Banks says. "We're going to have to work really hard to overcome this stigma that physicians now have. These readings are going to help. They're going to make a more compassionate physician and a more understanding public."
Neal Guffey admits it was the money that first attracted him to the project.
"After this first experience, I'd be more than happy to do this without getting a $50 stipend," he says."I got that much out of it.
"This was a real eye-opener for me to find out that there's a whole aspect of medicine that I haven't been introduced to in terms of outside people, like social workers, who work in the field with the handicapped and what have you," he adds. "I plan on doing rural family medicine, and I'm going to need as much of that support as I can possibly get."
Medical students are encouraged but not required to attend the presentations. Mailing lists, newspaper advertisements and posters are used to notify the public.
"Generally, these presentations attract the educated," Savitt says. "The one disappointment that we have is that our audience is not as diversified as we would like.A lot of private citizens who work at the university come, but it would be nice to reach other audiences, too."
