The audience in the 250-seat auditorium of the sleek new Veterans Administration Hospital in Salt Lake City last week was restless at first. But no audience ever entered more wholeheartedly into the spirit of a production. For the spectators were mental patients, and they were watching fellow patients enact a play about something they all felt intimately —the appearance of mental illness under unbearable strain. The play: The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
In the therapeutic technique of psychodrama (TIME, Jan. 24), patients act out their own experiences or roles related to them; in presenting...