Karen Ebenezer

I love live theater. I have a poster of Hamlet holding up Yorick’s skull above my desk, and a stack of playbills standing a foot high just under it. I even became a theatre critic at nineteen, writing for one of New York City’s premier online review magazines under the guidance of theater organization presidents and thirty-year pioneers in theater criticism. There is theatre inherent in the study of the human body – both medicine and stage drama put the human condition under the microscope and diagnose the many failings of the flesh. Healers from the time of ancient Greece would even prescribe watching a play to their patients. The two fields were deemed so critical to human health that the ancient Greek Sanctuary of Asklepios, situated on a scrap of verdure hillside in the town of Epidaurus, is both a hospital and theatre.

The last theater production I ever reviewed as a theater critic was a modern take on an ancient Greek tragedy. I was scribbling some derisory final notes – this may have sounded better if performed in Greek – when an audience member tumbled down the stairs leading down the theater and hit her head on the edge of a marble banister right next to me. Maroon blood bloomed out of her head. I held her neck steady, and when a towel was provided by some invisible hand, I pressed it firmly against the cut. Me and three others held her there; the play was stopped short, and the remaining hundreds in the audience were asked to leave. We kept saying soothing words until the EMT arrived, and I let go of her, my own head pounding from the experience.

I spent that night researching the consequences of concussion, of traumas to the brain and cerebral inflammation. I read about T cell tissue reservoirs, the blood brain barrier, and etiologies of infection in un-sanitized areas, like an alabaster-filled theater hall in the East Village. By the time I had finished, I knew which kind of live theatre I was really interested in. The woman at the play, and the many patients I have met since, demand a degree of human connection and empathy that the best kind of storytelling demands of its audiences. I find I cannot negotiate this medical journey – like the first time I placed my hands deep in the cavity of a cadaver, or heard a lung crackle, or held a woman’s bleeding head in a darkened East Village theater – without writing about it.

Atop that same theater in the Sanctuary of Asklepios, I once gave a lecture on the ancient hospitals of Greece, and how these sites typically included theaters where plays would be performed. Imagine twelve thousand patients sitting on these limestone steps, I said, listening to a story set to music. Imagine the laughter at a comedian’s badly plucked lyre, the tears at a foiled romance, the rush of adrenaline at a war speech. Some hold their bellies and limbs, recently lanced by the surgeon’s scalpel; others nurse invisible wounds of the mind. All are here to be healed by cool Peloponnesian zephyrs, a sunlit countryside theater, and its masked storytellers.