Stress Backstage? Call the Theater Shrink : ‘Dr. Bob’ Maurer uses family counseling skills to help actors thrown together performance after performance

Deborah Stack was caught in the middle of a real emotional storm. Actors in the long-running hit show “Tamara” wanted time off for TV and film jobs, but general manager Stack usually had to play the heavy and tell them “no”--the show had to go on. As might be expected, that made some people in the “Tamara” family pretty unhappy.

It was clearly another case for the theater shrink.

On and off for five years now, 44-year-old Robert Maurer has set up shop in the dining room of “Tamara’s” mock-Italian villa, using Il Vittoriale’s elegant table and chairs for his sessions as the play’s resident psychologist.

“Dr. Bob,” director of Behavioral Sciences for Santa Monica Hospital’s Family Practice Residency Program, simply adapts a few of his marriage counseling skills to the problems that can arise when you throw creative people together for eight demanding performances a week.

This time around, says Stack, “The actors thought management was unapproachable and management thought the actors were unapproachable. We sat down, we talked about the problem and we tried as much as possible to understand each other’s point of view--He got us working like a functional family.”

Most of us find work a relief from emotional pain, says Maurer, but actors, writers and other people in the arts instead “each day live the emotional element of the art they’re creating or participating in. Their success or failure is judged publicly, and from the artist, writer or producers’ point of view, often arbitrarily.”

That produces enormous stress, and after years of studying how successful people cope with stress, Maurer has come up with a stress management program tailored for people in the arts.

Indulging his own infatuation with the stage--he’s seen “The Phantom of the Opera” seven times--he heads backstage here and elsewhere, counseling actors and theater companies alike. He supplements medical statistics and chimpanzee videos with quotes from director Harold Prince’s autobiography, televised interviews with screenwriter Robert Towne and clips from such films as “Rain Man” and “Ordinary People.”

Participants in some of his classes and seminars have gone on to become therapy patients, says Maurer, but his theater clients never pay for treatment. His clients say he usually works just for expenses and sometimes even hangs around after performances to offer free on-the-spot counseling.

“In many other professions, one reaches a level of status and income and can anticipate that going on indefinitely,”Maurer says. “But the actor, and particularly the theater actor, has to struggle continually with the threat of being out of a job. The control actors feel over the quantity and quality of their work, and the reception it gets, is also utterly and completely out of their control, and that’s a hell of a way to live.”

Worse still, the stress doesn’t always disappear with success. “You have to tolerate an extraordinary amount of failure to succeed in the arts or entertainment,” says Maurer. “So when they finally succeed, some people start to self-destruct. Success triggers the alarm system and if you’re not feeling entitled, or are a worrier, it will diminish your ability to enjoy success and may cripple your willingness to risk again. This town is full of people who created one successful screenplay.”

Maurer’s full-time job at Santa Monica Hospital consists mainly of family counseling and training medical doctors to communicate better with their patients--he does the show business work on the side.

In his work, he has long focused on stress management, trying at first to reduce its impact with relaxation techniques, self-hypnosis and communication skills. Then one day, after reading how vaccines didn’t come about until scientists began to study who didn’t die during plagues, he felt psychology was making the same mistake by concentrating on people who were victims of stress rather than those who weren’t.

When reports came out saying that 40% of all air controllers had stress disorders, Maurer didn’t concentrate on the 40%. He thought it was a miracle that 60% did not suffer from stress. “How did we decide cholesterol was bad for you?” he asks. “We looked at why the Japanese didn’t get heart attacks. You look at who has the skill you want and what makes them different from you.”

In regard to stress, Maurer looks at those who handle it well in all aspects of their lives. “The people we are interested in understanding,” says Maurer, “are those who stay healthy romantically, physically and vocationally.”

Combining scientific data with character studies gleaned from such sources as films, books, and newspaper articles, Maurer came up with four traits that successful people exhibit in dealing with stress. Successful people, he found, are good at giving and receiving attention and can relate to their fears honestly and effectively by asking for help. Their internal voices support them in risk-taking so they don’t live in fear of making mistakes, and they have a vision of what they want and how to get it. (See box page 77.)

Tailoring all this for show business audiences, he’ll ask questions like: “How do you keep creative, inspired and energetic?” ( Answer: “Vision. There’s no creativity when you’re in doubt. Once we know what we want, life is easier.”) His presentation includes statistics from Variety about the odds for success with Broadway musicals as well as commentary on how to ease the pain of romance or rejection by a director.

Self-assured and amusing, Maurer keeps his lessons zipping along with analogies from his work at Santa Monica Hospital, his relationship with his parents, his dating experiences, his friends, even his cleaners. There’s plenty of snappy patter and clever phrasing as he calls complaining “junk food attention” and duly notes such things as “the four f’s that control your life--fight, flight, food and sex.”

Well aware that it’s a lot easier to look at errant behavior or defeatist attitudes on the big screen than in the bathroom mirror, Maurer also weaves in a great many film clips and videos. And whether he’s addressing a theater company, a UCLA Extension class on character development for screenwriters, or even his UCLA Extension class on intimacy, his star visual is a video of “Ordinary People,” a film “every therapist uses.”

Showing several scenes from that film, which depicts the effects on his immediate family when a young man drowns, Maurer points out how son Timothy Hutton denies his own needs, building up anger that later gets expressed inappropriately, while mother Mary Tyler Moore responds to her own fears by excessive criticism and distance. Moore and Hutton’s behavior on screen exemplify two types of “internal parents,” or injunctions we hear in our heads, but the kind of “internal parent” Maurer is after is one that encourages directness about being afraid and expressing needs.

This is particularly true in collaborative situations such as theater. At St. Petersburg’s American Stage, which used rehearsal time for a mandatory staff workshop with Maurer, producing director John Berglund says “for those of us in the business of creating catharsis as our product, it was an invaluable tool . . . Now it’s common to say in a staff meeting, ‘what are you afraid of?’ ”

Los Angeles theater professionals express similar sentiments. “When I’m in a situation now where I don’t have all the answers, he has given me permission to reach out to people who do,” says actress Patricia Gaul, a co-founder of the Los Angeles Children’s Theatre who attended a recent Maurer seminar sponsored by Los Angeles’ Theater League Alliance. “I thought stress was inevitable if you’re in an anxiety-ridden profession, but now I see it’s not really chronic. You can do something about it.”

Sometimes Maurer’s help is indirect, in fact. For instance, he encourages “Tamara’s” actors to discuss their problems positively in front of each other so that they support one another rather than tear each other down. When one actor started handing his fellow cast members critical notes on their performances, Maurer couldn’t get him “to come voluntarily to my Sunday night soires, so there was no way to help him with this behavior. But (I helped) the cast see him as afraid.”

Maurer says his only compensation for several years worth of regular visits to “Tamara” has been party invitations. He doesn’t complain about that, but he does say that producers generally “have no incentive to treat their actors and actresses as inventory and make sure they are well cared for and well maintained. I have full access at ‘Tamara,’ but had I sent a bill, they would have laughed at me.”

Maurer’s small, cluttered office at Santa Monica Hospital’s Les Kelley Family Health Center reflects his vocational split. Theater programs blanket nearly every wall, but there are stuffed animals on the floor and couch, and the cassette sitting on top of his video monitor this time isn’t “High Noon” or “Ordinary People” but rather a medical tape on depression.

On several different occasions, Maurer ingenuously remarks about his feelings of giving back to the theater, a medium he feels he’s gotten so much from. But he also says that the theater work gives him a break from harsh realities of his other work--like the preteen boy who was sexually abusing his 16-month-old sister.

Raised in Los Angeles, Brooklyn-born Maurer got a bachelor’s degree in psychology at UCLA, then worked as a probation officer in Van Nuys. The probation work “ignited” him about the impact of psychology, and he went back to college to get “some alphabet after my name.” Emerging from the University of Houston three years later with a doctorate in psychology, he started his work in behavioral medicine in Fresno, where he began helping doctors work more sensitively with their patients.

At Santa Monica Hospital, Maurer works with doctors and their patients, sometimes actually going into the examination room (with patients’ permission) to take notes on the doctor’s communication skills. He teaches doctors to identify risk factors and try to intervene before a person gets depressed, divorced or suicidal. And he helps doctors and patients alike treat tension headaches and obesity or cope with heart attacks or AIDS.

His branching out to arts medicine was serendipitous. Longtime friend Stephen Albert, managing director of the Taper, persuaded him to bring his stress management findings to a major meeting here of the California Theatre Council in the mid-’80s. There was a good-sized audience, and his talk there led to work with the Chicago Theatre League that continues today. His timing was also good. Los Angeles psychologist Thomas Backer, for one, was already conducting stress management seminars for film actors and directors, while in recent years, health professionals in New York and elsewhere have begun banding together to treat the special medical and psychological problems of dancers, musicians, actors and others.

Maurer readily admits that he gets plenty himself from his new sideline. For one thing, his private practice today is made up primarily of people in the business and technical sides of the arts. Moreover, he concedes, ‘Where on the planet could I find people who live with fear more creatively than actors? They help me understand fear better and help me embellish the theory and techniques.”

Maurer also received considerable publicity after “Tamara” publicist Diane Carter persuaded him, she says, “that promotion of ‘Tamara’ and the theater doctor made for a good marriage.” Although he says not a single call has come from all the media coverage, Carter’s office also helped him get a few speaking engagements and, she says, “a lot of people are aware of him now and that this service exists.”

As each class and seminar ends, the man is swamped at the podium. After the Theater League Alliance seminar, for instance, actor Douglas Sills said “For me, it was an opportunity to have a well researched medicine man address problems from an artistic viewpoint unique to our business with empathy and understanding.”

Another seminar attendee, Fred Vicarel, producer-director of the long-running production, “Specific Hospital,” says he’s hoping Maurer will stop by to help solve some of their communication problems. And Theater League Alliance executive director Karen Rushfield says her organization hopes to sponsor a second seminar later this year. “Everyone was interested (last time),” she says, “but their time didn’t allow it. I assume they’re so stressed out they don’t realize they need to step back and see what can help.”

Coming up soon for Maurer are a two-day workshop for writers at UCLA Extension, a talk to the Directors Guild and a trip to New Haven for work with Yale Drama School students and staff. Says Sharon Long, manager of the Florida Professional Theatres Assn.: “I’d bring him back every year if I could.”

Asked if he’s interested in getting into the arts himself, he shakes his head. “I get my acting urges expressed in my classes.” He’s currently working on a book about stress management, and continuing his research on the four skills of successful people.

Over at “Tamara,” meanwhile, “he’s got us thinking about our lives and realizing you can change things,” says general manager Stack, one of several people there who also sees Maurer individually. “All those personality traits that you thought you were stuck with can be changed, provided you want to go through all the work it takes. We want the show to be the best it can be, and it is better when the people working in and on it are the best they can be.”

Successful People: A Psychologist’s List of Traits

Here are psychologist Robert Maurer’s four traits of successful people:

1. An awareness of the biological need for attention or appreciation. They are able to both give and receive compliments and affection.

2. An awareness and respect for the emotion of fear. In response to fear, they reach out for comfort, including both emotional nurturance and technical assistance. They relate to their fears directly and effectively.

3. An “internal parent” that reassures them it is OK to make mistakes or be afraid or ask for help.

4. A sense of mission that they can also draw on when afraid. They know their goals and their order of importance. They can stay passionate, excited and directed despite rejection or pain. They see their journey as special and important and are thus willing to see rejection as just another experience.