Stop-Gap Troupe Stars on the Real-Life Stage

The subject of the Stop-Gap drama-therapy session at Anaheim’s Washington Community Center was--just two days before Thanksgiving--on everyone’s mind.

“Now, tell me,” Don Laffoon, Stop-Gap’s director, said to the eight senior citizens gathered around him, “what have you to be thankful for this year?”

Gertrude Garland wasted no time answering. “Oh, there’s much to be thankful for,” the 70-year-old said, softly but firmly. “I have my health, a place to live and eat. I have good friends.”

Mildred Huthmancher, 87, was just as direct: “We still have fun. We still take care of ourselves. We’re still individuals.”

It was a small moment, as moments go. A fleeting one. One that many may never have noticed or cared about.

But Laffoon and his acting troupe cherish such moments. They work hard to create the mood and the milieu to bring it about.

For a decade now, the still-small Stop-Gap, still financially struggling in Santa Ana, has guided hundreds of such drama-therapy sessions with cancer victims, the mentally and physically disabled, juvenile delinquents, alcoholics and abused children, as well as the elderly.

Stop-Gap’s objective is to use dramatic techniques, such as role playing or improvised stories, to draw people into discussing their problems and suggesting ways to deal with them.

“It’s helping to develop self-esteem and understanding of others as well as themselves,” said Laffoon, 44, a former Peace Corps volunteer who co-founded the troupe. “It gives people a way to stand back from their problems, to see them as others might see them.”

Most of all, he continued, “it’s about compassion for each other and the need to communicate--always to communicate--with each other.”

High ideals, especially for a group with just five full-time staff members, a few part-time volunteers and a budget of $180,000. But Stop-Gap has apparently won some backing from Orange County’s big-name benefactors.

Last week the Orange County Business Committee for the Arts, founded by the Fluor Corp. and other major corporations, named Stop-Gap winner of the committee’s 1987 Arts Award. Stop-Gap got a $1,000 cash prize.

There have been other, bigger grants: $38,800 from the County Board of Supervisors, $25,200 from the Pacific Mutual Foundation, $15,000 from the National Education Corp, $10,000 from the Orange County Register Charities.

All this has had its effect on community awareness.

“For a long time, it seemed hardly anyone knew about us,” Laffoon said. “But we kept plugging away because the need was always there, and we’ve always had a waiting list of agencies wanting our help.

“And now, I guess we’re no longer a secret in Orange County.”

Drama-therapy is considered a relatively new form of theater. According to Renee Emunah, president of the National Assn. for Drama Therapy, Stop-Gap, which works in medical centers, prisons and other social and community institutions, is one of just a few such organizations in the United States--and the “only one serving such a diversity of clients on a regular basis.”

Founded by Laffoon and director-designer Victoria Bryan in 1977, Stop-Gap started as a project for the elderly (its name refers to generational and other societal “gaps”). Originally, it was affiliated with South Coast Repertory Theatre. When federal funds for their project ran out in 1979, Laffoon and Bryan formed their own nonprofit organization and kept going.

Backed by modest grants from various agencies, Stop-Gap expanded to include sessions at such places as the county’s Orangewood Children’s Home (for abused and neglected children), Juvenile Hall and Childrens Hospital of Orange County’s cancer ward.

At the hospital, patients are shown subtle, gentle ways of confronting death. One such method: the children jot down messages “to leave the world” and imagine them placed in balloons floated out their ward windows.

At Orangewood, improvised sketches often deal with family clashes, dating, dropping out of school, drugs and alcohol, and parental abuse. The children, meeting in groups of 12, are asked to take on all the roles, including those of the parents, teachers and police officers.

One sketch at Orangewood recently concerned a mother confronting her daughter about the girl’s use of drugs. Afterward, one participant commented that the “daughter” in the sketch “doesn’t care for herself. She has to want to help herself before anyone else can help her.” But another participant felt differently: “She wants attention. She wants to be caught.”

At Anaheim’s Washington Community Center, last week’s discussion of Thanksgiving brought out comments, warm and bitter, on visits with children, maintenance of their independence and the aging process itself.

“Getting older isn’t easy,” 70-year-old Dave Lacey told the other participants. “I’m lucky, I have a wonderful sister (to visit). But you also learn new things. You learn you can create a new kind of family, right here at the center. These are people who understand, who care.”

Stop-Gap has also presented “playlets” about social problems to students at more than 100 junior and senior highs in the county. The first, “When No Means No,” a 15-minute story about date rape, was presented in conjunction with the Laguna Beach Community Clinic and toured schools for four years until money ran out last spring.

Still touring is “Under Pressure,” about drug abuse. Unlike the other playlets, its cast doesn’t include Stop-Gap actors, but youths from Phoenix House, a rehabilitation facility in Santa Ana for teen-age drug users. The latest playlet, “His Brother’s Keeper,” about an AIDS victim, has just started touring; it has been to Rancho Santiago and Golden West colleges and will soon be presented at Thurston Middle School in Laguna Beach.

To help raise money, and to help keep the public abreast of the issues its members care so deeply about, Stop-Gap has also staged plays on the county’s community-theater circuit. These productions have included “The Miracle Worker” about Helen Keller, “The Shadow Box” about a hospital for the terminally ill, “Extremities,” about rape and, in October, “Listen to the Dreaming” about AIDS. A Stop-Gap original, “When the Bough Breaks,” based on sessions at Orangewood with child-abuse victims, was presented in 1982.

Stop-Gap has won nothing but raves.

“It’s an exceptional method by which to reach people and bring into the open both their pains and hopes,” said Kay Brown of New Directions, a facility in Costa Mesa for alcoholic women.

Luis Martinez of Phoenix House thinks the role playing gives the youngsters “a chance to take a third-person view of themselves. In this way, they can often see themselves in a clearer light.”

William Steiner, executive director of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, said: “We haven’t quantified this; I don’t think any institution has been able to. But counselors tell us that many of the children (from Stop-Gap sessions) have become more open about their lives, more willing to talk about it.”

To Stop-Gap staffers, the social-action aspects of their program far outweigh financial and other career-type concerns.

“I’d rather do this than seek a career in the regular theater,” said Robert Knapp, 32, who studied drama at UC Irvine before joining Stop-Gap seven years ago.

“Our sessions are so unpredictable, so emotional,” said Knapp, who wrote all three of Stop-Gap’s touring playlets and who now is taking graduate courses in counseling. “It’s real theater, real lives.”

Knapp’s feelings are shared by the other staff members: Richard Jung, Barbara Porter, Corbett Barkley (the newest recruit) and, of course, by Laffoon.

“For me,” Laffoon said, “this is theater as social action. Let’s face it: This is about as direct as you can get.”