By day they are crisis workers, case managers, social workers, registered nurses, psychiatric technicians, therapists, and administrators. Busy people with important jobs, for sure. And with the daily challenges of their work, staff members at inpatient psychiatric hospitals rarely have time to breathe, let alone share a cultural experience.
This past fall, however, these men and women stepped way out of their comfort zones and became actors playing country doctors, housewives, newspaper delivery boys, neighborhood gossips, high school sweethearts, and even a drunken choir master, breathing life into Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.
Our Town is a 1938 three-act play by Thornton Wilder. It tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover’s Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of the people who live there. Our Town was first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on January 22, 1938. It later went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
To see a video and hear, in their own words, about the journey that this cast of colleagues has had and the impact that the play has had on their lives, please visit the OC87 Recovery Diaries website.
Staff from the Montgomery County Emergency Service during the production of Our Town