Word: bergman
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This is theater of the prison cell, an unsparing, nerve-jarring mirror to the interior world of the convict. It is guided by the Geese Company, a remarkable troupe of nine young actors founded and led by a former University of Iowa drama teacher, John Bergman, 40. Since 1980 the actors have been crisscrossing the country in a rickety red-and-white bus, playing in penitentiaries and juvenile-detention centers, holding theatrical workshops and performing their largely improvised plays about prison life. One aim is to force prisoners to admit to themselves that criminal behavior is stupid and ugly...
...Jill Reinier, 26, Katy Emck, 23 and Pamela Daryl, 21, it is a personal test of courage to work with men who have committed violent sexual acts against women. Admits Reinier: "As a woman I can't help feeling their crime intensely." But, says Emck, who was recruited by Bergman when the troupe visited the Edinburgh Festival last year, "you try your hardest to see past the crime and reach the mind of the man beyond...
...ground for this eight-day theater-and-therapy workshop has been prepared by a previous visit to Bridgewater in which 15 volunteer patients (as the center calls its inmates) were guided in the creation of a drama about incidents that had affected their adult lives. On this visit Bergman's task is even more complex: to dredge up memories from the ages of five to twelve and assemble them into a play. Since, as center Administrator Ian Tink notes, "90% of these patients were sexually abused as children," the hope is that by seeing themselves as victims they will realize...
Most of the cast members from the earlier production have returned to take part in Bergman's unconventional methods for trying, as Company Member Tom Swift, 25, puts it, "to open the doors onto emotions." The director begins by asking the volunteers to act out scenes from childhood. One patient portrays a child playing with toy soldiers. He says he is blowing up his mother and father with a tank. A second man is told to imagine being discussed by his parents at a cocktail party; when an actress begins playing the role of his mother, he breaks down...
...start to emerge from the thickets of memory: eating tomatoes and then being screamed at by a shrewish mother; a father's leaving home; an overheard neighbors' conversation about a brutal father; being rejected by schoolmates. Hal (all patients' names . in this article are fictitious) is responding quickly to Bergman's constant probing and badgering. "It's like a crash course in therapy -- the emotions come up so quickly," he says. "At the same time, you know you're safe because it's only a play...