Professor Uncovers the Tender, Often Invisible Ways We Care for One Another in New Play

In 2021, Tom Story was teaching at Georgetown when he began to feel ill. It wasn't the flu. It wasn't COVID-19. But something wasn't right.

He went to a local hospital for treatment. But things got worse. A blood clot in his heart moved to the stem of his brain, and his brain began to bleed. Story was rushed to MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, where he'd spend the next few weeks recovering in a hospital bed.

"No one could really figure out what was happening," he said.

It would take months for a diagnosis to come and for Story to fully recover.

Tom Story is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts. Photo by Chris Banks.

Three years later, Story stood on a stage at the Mosaic Theater in Washington, DC, and shared his health journey beside fellow actors. His story wasn't about his illness, he said. It was about the loved ones who stood beside him during a scary and precarious time.

"The miracle really is the people who helped me through it, the people I leaned on," he said. "It's not a play about illness. It's a play about care."

Care is at the heart of Professor Derek Goldman's new play, The Art of Care, which debuted on Oct. 31. He developed it with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politicsat Georgetown, where he serves as executive director, and in conversations with members of the School of Health, the Global Health Institute, the School of Nursing, MedStar Health and the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown.

The Art of Care tells the stories of caregivers, of nurses and doctors, of teachers, of policymakers, of the seven performers' own raw stories of receiving and giving care.

"The question of the piece is can we begin to imagine a world where we put care for one another at the center?" said Goldman, who is a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and School of Foreign Service. "And if we look at our political lives, if we look at war, if we look at all these things, where are we failing at that kind of essential sense of care?"

Goldman is also seeking a broader goal: how telling stories about care can heal, connect and ease feelings of isolation and loneliness. How art itself can be care.

Photo by Chris Banks.

How Have You Experienced Care?

In 2020, Goldman began teaching the course, Performance and Pandemic. He wanted to create a space for students to creatively process what was happening during the isolation and uncertainty of COVID-19. But the course also deepened his own thinking around art and health care and well-being.

Researchers have found that playing music can lessen anxietyand may help boost the immune system; that theater can help performers heal from trauma or PTSD. New research even found that the very act of attending a concert or watching a live performance together synchronizes audiences' heartbeatsand pulse rates.

Goldman wanted to find out what we were missing when we weren't getting this theater fix during the pandemic. Around that time, he was also scaling a method called In Your Shoes, in which people listen to each other's stories and then perform them. He started using the topic of care as a prompt for conversations. A dam broke, he said.

"That invitation to talk about how care shows up in people's lives was like a torrent," Goldman said. "People were like, 'I haven't shared this.' I started to realize that what we were doing was an art of care - the way people ended up caring for one another's stories because they were so tender and vulnerable."

Goldman knew something bigger was at play. In collaboration with Reginald Douglas(C'09), a former student of his and the artistic director of the Mosaic Theater, Goldman began assembling a group of actors who were invited to share and perform each other's stories of care. Stories like a Syrian refugee seeking asylum in the U.S. A stranger bandaging an actor's bleeding knee on the street. A daughter cupping her mother's warm cheek as she lay dying.

They also began interviewing Georgetown community members for their stories of being cared for and caring for others.

Small Acts of Care in the Cancer Ward

Julia Langleyis the faculty director of the Georgetown Lombardi Arts and Humanities Program.

In a conversation with the actors and Goldman, she shared how she had been diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago and received treatment at Georgetown Lombardi.

Now, she offers therapeutic artistic activities for patients there as part of the Arts and Humanities Program: small acts of care like handing out paper cranes and cards, and bigger ones, like musicians meeting with patients and playing their favorite songs.

"The Arts and Humanities Program is not frosting," Langley told the actors. "The arts are not a little decoration on top of medical care. They are baked into the cake of medical care. Because if you feel better, then I believe you heal better."

In early November, Langley attended The Art of Careand watched as her name popped up on the stage's screen. An actress performed her words and story. Her eyes lit up.

"Derek did a fantastic job of weaving all those stories together," she said afterward. "His work is essential at this time of uncertainty and polarization in our country. We need to hear each other's stories."

Christopher J. King, dean of the School of Health and an associate professor, also shared his personal story of caring for his mother with the actors and Goldman. King said productions and initiatives like The Art of Careprovide opportunities for students in the School of Health to learn about the connections between art and health care - and how to humanize the data they study in a way that can impact hearts and minds.

"Our students learn about these disparities, these issues that families face when caring for people, but how do we tell the story in a way that connects people and really speaks to our humanity?" he said. "We want to catalyze unconventional ways of disseminating knowledge and inspire a new generation to advocate for change."

A Student Finds the Art of Care

Wonnie Kim (H'25), a senior in the School of Health, is one such student exploring health care and theater. She had always thought of her theater and academic worlds as separate; theater was what she did in her off-hours.

Over the summer, Kim learned about The Art of Careand sent Goldman a cold email. She ended up becoming the assistant director of the play, providing feedback on potential changes to the set, blocking or the script, researching art and health care, helping anywhere she could. She learned that her two worlds were not as separate as she thought.

"I learned a lot of people are doing this in their fields or in health research or just studies that people are seeing the power of combining the arts and health," she said. "I'm very much looking for something that allows me to do that interdisciplinary work that I'm able to do in college."

On Nov. 21, she helped organize a night for School of Health students to attend the play.

The Art of Careruns until Nov. 24 - though Goldman hopes this is just the start of a bigger project.

"I want the play to move people, but it's really what can happen next. What happens in these rooms when people are invited in and have a chance to listen and share these stories?" he said. "This work, it's not partisan work. It's not about people's opinions. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. It connects people at a human level, and I think that can build a powerful foundation."

Photo by Chris Banks.

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• performing arts