Coping with Life’s Problems on Stage

From chick flicks to war dramas, most people have experienced the cathartic relief of a good cry from watching a movie. In real drama therapy, however, patients take to their own personal stage and work through their problems.

“Drama therapy allows people to express themselves in a contained way,” says Robert J. Landy ’66, a pioneer in this therapeutic approach.

Landy explains that by allowing these patients to act out fictions during role play or improvisations, they learn to deal with emotions and feelings that they otherwise are unable to face.

The founder and director of the Drama Therapy Program at New York University, Landy knows the power of the theater. For more than 40 years he has worked in the field, helping to formalize the educational study of drama therapy. In 1986, he wrote the first textbook for its study, Drama Therapy—Concepts, Theories and Practices. This seminal work helped solidify this approach in counseling and train creative arts therapists internationally.

While there is much more work to be done in quantifying drama therapy’s success in treating patients, Landy points out that advances in neuroscience are confirming that the approach is not only liberating, it is healing. And the professor is a witness to its strength.

“I am working with someone who had been in prison for 25 years,” says Landy, who holds a joint appointment at NYU as professor of educational theatre and applied psychology. “He was a lost human being who has recreated his life through drama. I see how that person comes to life (through the process). It still thrills me. The work is very powerful.”

Prior to his clinical work in prisons, Landy notably worked with New York City public school children traumatized by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. An award-winning documentary film, Standing Tall, focused on how the young students turned their stories into a theatrical performance and most important, how they used drama therapy to cope with the tragedy.

In some ways, that work built upon the books Landy had published that year. How We See God and Why It Matters and God Lives in Glass look at how children view God. The former chronicles Landy’s qualitative research involving children from different cultures and the latter attempts to give the children’s point of view about God.

Landy’s research found that how we see God is determined by many factors: age, religion, parents’ beliefs, and socioeconomic and political realities. It also found that children perceive God as very vulnerable and very human.

This complex picture of God came to life on stage when Landy helped create a musical of God Lives in Glass in 2003. Landy says that he needs to remain connected to artistic expression in order to practice drama therapy, and he insists that all graduate students in his program do the same.

He has acted with the Roundabout Theatre Company and Theater for the New City in New York and at various regional theaters. He has directed plays in Los Angeles and New York, where a number of his dramas and musical plays have been produced. He created and performed in 48 half-hour programs for the series “Drama in Education,” broadcast nationally on CBS.

Landy started his work in theater as an actor, participating in Lafayette’s Little Theater program as an English major. Under the direction of Minott “Mike” Coombs and the English department chair, William Watt, the program flourished, and so did Landy’s enthusiasm for the art.

Landy says that Watt was a fascinating human being and “very theatrical himself.” More important, he says, Watt’s openness and warmth made a lasting impression on the young student.

“I want [students] to have a relationship with me like I had with Dr. Watt,” says Landy, who was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award at New York University in 2002.

He has been at the forefront of the formal development of drama therapy since starting in 1967 as a tutor for severely disturbed children in New York. He accepted a position at a special education secondary school and taught children who otherwise might have been considered unteachable. Some were mildly disturbed, others bordered on psychotic, and a number of children suffered from what today would be called autism.

Without a traditional background in psychology, Landy searched for ways to reach these children.

“I was just a kid, 22 years old. I really didn’t understand mental illness,” he says.

He began to study psychology and to use the arts to break down the walls separating him from his students. It seemed a promising avenue for more children, though some doctors insisted that the way drama therapy engages participants would overstimulate their patients. But Landy persisted.

“I really threw myself into it in a deep wayit is incredible work. I’ve never stopped,” he says. “It’s been 40 years and it keeps feeding me.”

Over time, medical doctors and social workers saw that such therapeutic efforts were having an incredible impact.

Landy would study Enlish literature at Brandeis University and earn a Ph.D. in theater, psychology, and English education from the University of California. A Fulbright scholar and lecturer, he served as editor-in-chief of the international journal The Arts in Psychotherapy.

A prolific researcher and author, Landy will publish his eleventh book, The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy (Rowman & Littlefield), next month.

“This book is a monumental intellectual achievement destined to become a classic. Landy’s cogent and insightful rendering of the roots of action therapies alone provides a rich background study of this important and often poorly understood field,” says John Woodall, a psychiatrist and faculty member at The Judge Baker Children’s Center at Harvard Medical School and founder of The Unity Project, a curriculum for teaching respect for diversity. “A true tour de force, The Couch and the Stage will serve as a foundational guide to students and professionals in the action therapies, psychodynamic, constructivist and cognitive-behavioral therapies for years to come.”