Audiences attending the Workman Theatre Project’s 1993 production of
Shirley Barrie’s Tripping Through Time were first ushered through the door
of a large façade that stood on the west lawn of Toronto’s Queen
Street Mental Health Centre grounds. The façade consisted of ten
connected flats painted to resemble the site’s original 1850 buildings,
those of Ontario’s first Provincial Lunatic Asylum. As they entered, an
actor playing the asylum’s first Medical Superintendent, Dr. Joseph Workman,
ticked off their “diagnoses”: “Epileptic. Senile. Exceedingly Violent […]
Homeless” (7). As the audience moved across the site with the performers,
they were invited to experience aspects of patient life throughout the
site’s history. This paper first considers how the production’s use of
environmental theatre techniques aimed to collapse the distinction between
audience and performer, asylum inmate and theatre participant. It then
argues that these choices are connected to the broader strategies for representing
mental illness developed by the Workman Theatre Project. Since 1991, the
company has created theatre focused on mental health issues by combining
the skills of professional theatre artists with its own members, artists
who have received mental health services.
05/26: 1545