'Therapy' we all need

In “Therapy (After the Flood)”, continuing onstage all this month, a husband and wife waiting to see a counsellor tell the audience what’s wrong. He’s an engineer who went a little crazy because of the flooding – and also because of his bossy wife.
Art therapist Anupan “Khru Mos” Pluckpankhajee gets them arranging flowers in a vase. Then he asks the wife to wait outside while her husband does some drawing and painting.
An SMS summons the husband from the room to make a call. The therapist ascertains that the message isn’t from the wife and tells the husband to sit back down. The therapist sums things up for us after this 45-minute session.
“Therapy” is presented by the Collective Experience, led by Nophand Boonyai, and the Arts Container, a group of professional therapists who use different forms of art to ease or cure maladies.
What I described above was opening night. The action will change every night because the cast shifts, including two other therapists who are on standby who use drama and dance rather than art.
 My house was inundated and I didn’t appreciate the government mismanagement of the crisis, so I fully empathised with the show.
There were aspects of it I didn’t like, such as the generic background mood music and the ceiling camcorder used to watch the patient drawing. Perhaps they’re afraid the performance would be “too silent” and not visual enough without the gimmickry.
But, just as Nophand and his co-creator Dujdao Vadhanapakorn Boonyai intend, this show treads the fine lines between fiction and reality and between theatre and art therapy.
It’s another reminder that art derives from life and that, technology notwithstanding, we still love realistic theatre.
Saifah Tanthana deserves much credit for his realistic portrayal of a middle-aged man who can’t control his anger, credit he must share with Donruedee Jamraschai as his nagging wife.
Khru Mos, who’s not a professional actor, was a little nervous in his opening monologue when he memorably said his job was to bring beauty back into his patients’ lives. As his delivery smoothed out, he drew us deeper into his art therapy and proved those words true.
Nophand, who came up with these fictional characters to be treated by real-life therapists, says in the programme that this was his first venture outside of his own personal stories.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul said something similar about his film “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”.
These artists certainly aren’t running out of personal stories to share. Rather, they realise how other media overlook so many stories and characters around them.
In the end, I think I need “Therapy” too. But will they take this “actor” who’s never come to a rehearsal?
 
GET CURED
You have an appointment to see “Therapy (After the Flood)” anytime until January 29, any day except Thursday at 7.30 in the B-Floor Room at the Pridi Bhanomyong Institute. (This Wednesday is sold out.)
Tickets cost Bt350 at (084) 713 5075, or Bt600 to see the show twice or Bt800 thrice.
E-mail [email protected] to learn who the therapist and patients on any given day.