A DRAMATIC REMEDY : At State Hospitals, Homeless Shelters and Psychiatric Clinics, the Imagination Workshop Unleashes the Curative Power of Creativity

STORIES FROM THE PSYCH WARD ARE RICH WITH THE IMPROBABLE. Here, for instance, sitting mute with a hangdog look inside a corridor of Camarillo State Hospital, is a young woman with a crushing past. When fortune attended in her homeland of Cambodia, she had food to eat; when it was wanting, as happens when war descends, her mind cracked. Now, 17 years later, she’s shadowed by flashbacks, sudden hysterical outbursts of laughter and wretched moments of silence. Some days, though, the silence gives way to a magical power.

Then, as on this Thursday afternoon, in a sun-filled art studio down the hall, she dons a theatrical mask and becomes Entre, goddess of peace, who can cause all around her to stop fighting and to grow food. “We have peace!” she cries out from behind the mask, prompted by three wildly supportive theater professionals who sit around her in a circle. Along with two other patients and a recreational therapist, they are all engaged in something called the Imagination Workshop. If only for an instant, for one piercing moment of clarity, the young woman’s creativity as an actor brings her a glimpse of sanity. And pleasure. “We have peace! We have peace!”

Applause. Cheers. Kudos. Hugs. Her performance, which includes a hauntingly graceful dance, is part of an improvisational piece she’s written with others in this unlikely troupe--a suicidal woman who can barely speak but sings like Janice Joplin and a schizophrenic man who obsessively questions people about their teeth. Peace of mind, though, is short-lived. When she takes her seat and lifts her mask, a veil of madness descends: She is delusional again, giggling and paranoid, with eyes flashing and bright red lips puckered.

Such stories of transformation-- catharsis , the Greek tragedians called it--are legend in theater and psychiatric circles. This one, though, is true.

“I’M PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” IT IS A MONDAY AFTERNOON last spring, and the speaker is not George Bush but Bruce, a slender man with a wispy beard sitting beside me at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk.

“What about George Bush?” I ask him.

“I’m a decoy for President Bush,” he says, conspiratorially. “They’re holding me hostage here. I was sold at birth. Guess who my mother and father are?”

“Who?”

“Ronald and Nancy Reagan.”

I laugh out loud at the thought of Nancy Reagan giving birth to this black man. He laughs, too, but then furtively whispers, “They’re trying to kill me here. Could you fake my death?”

Inside an old, pink stucco building at the back end of the hospital grounds, I am in a circle with Bruce and 12 other patients and three “art-ists”--as the professional actors, writers and directors of the Imagination Workshop are called. The proceedings are Fellini-esque: A collection of severely mentally ill people pretending to be Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson and other famous singers. Rehearsing a show they’ve written and will eventually title “When You Lend a Hand, You Get One Back,” the patients are asked to select musicians they want to be and to name their favorite charity.

When it is his turn, Bruce picks British rocker Robert Plant because, he says, Plant sings “lowdown dirty blues,” and his charity is AIDS. But Bruce can barely focus, his concentration dimmed by his mental illness. He turns to me and asks: “Did you know Daryl Gates is a little girl?”

A month later, I return to watch this workshop’s final performance and am moved to tears. By Hollywood standards, the show is pretty hokey, a sort of “Psychotics’ Amateur Hour.” Each patient takes a turn at the microphone, sometimes barely audible, singing an original tune with a goofy hat on and, often, a dull expression. But virtually every performer clearly craves the very thing he or she usually fears most: human contact. Their involvement makes them forget their disability and reach, albeit only momentarily, across the barrier between “them” and “us.” And given the progress of the revue in the span of a month--from a ragtag jumble of psychotic rants to a well-rehearsed expression of human desire--their efforts seem nothing short of heroic.

After the finale, each performer is handed a single red rose. “It don’t smell like no cheap rose,” Bruce tells me, smiling broadly, as the audience of patients and staff troop back to their units. It is the first time his conversation is not bedeviled by paranoid gibberish.

During the six weeks last spring that I tagged along with Imagination Workshop artists at a variety of workshops, snapshots like this one--of despair shifting to hope--developed over and over again. “It’s really about the human condition,” says the group’s director, Mary McCusker, a no-nonsense blond dynamo and professional actress. “We did a group poem at Metropolitan State Hospital about what your imagination means to you. This one patient, who’s particularly delusional, turned to me and said, ‘It means everyone in this room is equal.’ And I really feel that’s true about creativity.”

Somewhere on the border of creativity and madness, the Imagination Workshop operates within the far reaches of the subconscious. The basic idea behind it is that the creative process of theater can have a healing effect on people with a wide variety of problems. Psychiatric patients, the homeless and the abused often turn their imaginations inward, using their creativity destructively. But in the safety of playing someone else, of improvising a scene or a feeling, they can rediscover their wishes and dreams and ultimately change their behavior, however fleetingly. If that sounds corny, it is, but it’s also profound: empowerment through the imagination.

“What’s so moving,” says Ilene Goodwoman, who oversees the state’s Arts in Mental Health programs, “is seeing patients in other settings in the hospital, where they’re listless and never talk to each other, and then they walk into the Imagination Workshop and they literally come alive. It’s really quite remarkable. What we see is a new potential we never thought was there before.” Says Dr. Robin Kissell, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA: “These are often patients who have been stomped on or squashed. Normally, their dysfunction is the focus of therapy. To offer them the opportunity to explore what’s positive is very powerful--asking the healthy part of a person to be shared.”

Adds Rose Reeder, chief of rehabilitation therapy at Patton State Hospital just outside San Bernardino: “It’s very basic. When people become mentally ill, they forget how to play. Imagination Workshop has helped to bring them to life again--to laugh, to have fun, to be creative and get recognition for that, to discover themselves again. It brings the outside in. It lets people know there are some who care enough to come all the way from L. A. to be with them. And while it’s not therapy, it is therapeutic. We’ve seen patients change, from being unable to participate in the beginning because of hallucinations to becoming confident. And it’s because these actors are so accepting of these patients.”

What began with two people 23 years ago in New York City now has nearly 30 artists working at five sites in Southern California: the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, Gramercy Place homeless shelter, and Camarillo, Patton and Metropolitan state hospitals. The workshops deal with isolated populations--from psychiatric patients, abused children and homeless families to geriatric patients and prisoners--that society tends to warehouse and forget. In February, the Imagination Workshop will expand to include a 12-week pilot project in the Los Angeles Unified School District, working with troubled kids at the 32nd Street School, a performing arts magnet school, and at the Achievement Center, one of the district’s 24 alternative high schools, in South-Central Los Angeles.

The program has evolved and grown, but the basics of the workshops have changed very little. They still consist of weekly sessions that are essentially like improvisational acting classes. The artists coach the participants through warm-up exercises, creativity work of the “let’s pretend” variety, and then into developing characters, stories, songs, dances and props that are often combined in a grand finale: a real performance. A few of the workshops are specialized--one emphasizes playwriting, another mask-making.

Over the years, many now-famous celebrities have worked with the program, including Susan Sarandon, Blythe Danner and Sam Waterston. Cher and Henry Winkler now serve on its advisory board. But despite its Hollywood ties, the Imagination Workshop has little of Tinseltown’s glitzy trappings or high-profile image. None of its current crop of artists would get star billing, for example, and it’s hardly a big-bucks celebrity charity: The program’s $120,000 annual budget, used to pay the artists and operate eight separate workshops that range in length from 12 weeks to nine months, comes mostly from private grants, with some help from the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and the California State Lottery. Every year, the workshop struggles to pay its bills; in recessionary 1992, its lottery allotment was cut by $12,000 and next year, as always, its private grants are uncertain. When McCusker turned to Hollywood fundraising this year, the response was minimal--$6,000.

That relatively small amount was no surprise to some involved in the workshop. “The Imagination Workshop is a place where people are allowed to just be who they are, and that is not a regular thing in this town,” says Susan Arnold, a board member and film producer whose current project, “Benny and Joon,” concerns the relationship of a brother and his schizophrenic sister. “It’s really accepting, not just for patients but for the artists, too. I think that’s because it’s about acting as a form of healing, as opposed to the Hollywood way.”

PATTON STATE HOSPITAL, A FACILITY FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, SITS BEhind barbed-wired gates in San Bernardino County, some 60 miles from Hollywood and Vine. By 8:30 a.m., three Los Angeles-based actors--Mel Johnson Jr., Camille Ameen and Greg Cruz--are drinking coffee in an office at the hospital, talking over their plans for that day’s Imagination Workshop and meeting with Patton therapists. Every workshop begins thisway, so that the artists can be brought up to date on the progress and problems of the participants. “It lets us know who we might want to sit next to that day, or who needs to be separate, or who needs a little extra care,” explains Johnson.

This day, the artists and 10 patients gather in the usual workshop circle. Each highly structured workshop, which lasts 90 minutes, always begins with a warm-up exercise or two. Let’s take an imaginary dip, says one of the artists, into a nice, inviting pool of water.

Psssh.

Whooosh.

Whiish.

Aaaaah.

Around the circle, everyone physically acts out his name, attaching a movement to the sound of “Mel” and “Camille” and “Greg” that the group repeats--clapping, jumping, arms gliding, hopping side to side. The warm-ups are all about bringing the group together, creating a whole out of separate parts.

Once everyone is out of the water, named and generally warmed up, the next stage of the session begins. In workshop parlance, part two is called “passing,” and it requires each participant to turn to his or her neighbor, grasp a hand, and “pass” something on--something personal or something directed toward the other person. “If you could name a star for a person,” the artists might ask, “what person would that be?” Or, as it happens now, the passing exercise might create a free-form group poem, lines tossed from one participant to the next, around the circle.

Abandonment, fear, abuse and love--in a good week, all of those topics can find their way into the long improvisational routines that are the main event at an Imagination Workshop. At Patton, the assignment is to “be” a fairy tale character and express a secret wish. The Big Bad Wolf tells Peter Pan, played by Johnson, that he doesn’t really want to keep eating those pigs (this from a man who later tells me he’s been committed to the hospital because he attempted to have sex with a young boy and girl). The Wicked Witch wants to kill everybody because she’s mad at the world (from a woman who won’t tell me why she’s hospitalized). And Spider-Man would like to placate his wife who wants a Spider-Baby (from a man who says he started a brush fire near Magic Mountain, coming off a binge on crack cocaine.)

This is the final workshop in a multi-week series at Patton. Though there are rehearsed bits in it, and the staff has been invited to sit in as the audience, these patients are still too withdrawn, too ill to take on a full-blown “show.” All the parts go well, and the final reports, written by the artists for their own benefit as well as the therapists’, will be positive, but this day culminates with bittersweet goodbys, where an ending is also seen as a beginning.

By contrast, the last workshop at the Camarillo hospital’s Unit 70, the kids’ unit, is a triumph. When Jonathan Zeichner, Mary McCusker and fellow artist Norma Bowles, arrive, they are greeted like the Triumverate of Good Will--slapping high fives, giving hugs, boosting egos.

At Camarillo, there are kids with police records. Kids who are outcasts. Kids who have been locked in closets. Kids who were made to run drugs by their parents. Kids who were prostitutes. Kids who have been sexually abused. Kids who sometimes end up in Unit 70’s seclusion room, out of control, shrieking, kicking at the door.

“These kids, when they go, they go,” says McCusker. “They lose it. They take furniture.” But right now, nine of them are singing and dancing and finding a way to get out of themselves in a show they’ve written called “Let’s Take It Fresh, Baby. “ To watch them perform inside the school library--where the card catalogue and bookshelves are covered by a whimsical backdrop of spattered paint and Day-Glo handprints--is like watching a fairy tale for the ‘90s come true, one that involves drugs, domestic abuse, love, loss, rage and even a shot at renewal. Here, no one can make a mistake. No one is judged. No one is analyzed. No one lacks artistry.

It is in small, simple ways that they have gotten to this point. One boy, for example, insisted on staying rolled up in a ball in the corner during his first workshop, Zeichner remembers. “He’s incredibly angry and he’s dyslexic,” Zeichner says. “He’s much calmer and focused now.” Why the difference? Part of it, Zeichner says, was a basic discovery: “He’s a whiz at sound effects.” Another boy, whom Zeichner described as “horribly abused and really fearful of humiliation,” also happened to be “hilariously funny.”

Onstage, a boy with shaggy hair and a history of violence acts as the group leader and sings a tune he’s written: “Songbird is happy. In a good mood. Very good mood.” Fearful that people will laugh at her, a girl all but paralyzed by stage fright nonetheless sings an original dirge, called “My World Is Gone”--and the kids in the audience erupt with Arsenio-like, woof-woof applause.

Together, the ensemble of white, black and brown kids clasp hands with the adult artists and sing:

We are proud of today

We are proud of today

because there are so many things

in the world today

to make it a better day

The hospital staff is nothing if not ecstatic about the program’s impact. “The first day these artists came out here, these kids wouldn’t relate to each other,” recalls Allan Murray, chief of central program services at Camarillo. “But by the end of the session, they were all holding hands and assuming characters of their own choosing and saying goodby to each other. It’s unheard of doing that in a therapeutic milieu.” Adds Jack Cheney, an art therapist at Camarillo: “These kids are salvageable. The Imagination Workshop shows us how they can open up. I’m convinced they’ll all be productive members of society.”

THE LINK BETWEEN THEATER AND MADNESS CAN BE TRACED, AT LEAST IN part, to 16th-Century London at St. Mary’s of Bethlehem--called Bedlam--where tens of thousands of visitors would pay 1 pence admission to laugh at the “show of bedlam” of insane and retarded residents there. In turn, drama historians suggest that the perverse practice influenced the theater, with more characters who were “fools” or insane, and more plays, such as “The Duchess of Malfi,” set in insane asylums.

But the use of theater as a form of therapy didn’t become an accepted practice until Jacob L. Moreno, a Viennese psychiatrist and contemporary of Freud, pioneered the field of psychodrama in the 1930s. In it, patients act out traumatic situations from their own lives under the guidance of a therapist. By 1979, the field had advanced enough to see the creation of the National Assn. for Drama Therapy, which today includes 300 members, many of them actors-turned-therapists.

Against that background, the Imagination Workshop distinguishes itself by staying away from psychodrama. The participants never play themselves, the workshops purposely don’t focus on pathology and there are no specific treatment goals. If there is a basic tenet of the workshop, it is that the artists are not therapists. “We really don’t get into their mishigas ,” says Norma Bowles, who majored in masked theater at Princeton University and earned an MFA in directing from California Institute of the Arts. “It’s really taking them outside of that and working with art for art’s sake,” she adds. “So the focus is the enjoyment of creating or the enjoyment of working with other people. Or just laughing.”

The program got its start in 1969, and not surprisingly, its beginnings had much more to do with theater than with therapy. At that time, actress Margaret Ladd (later of “Falcon Crest” fame), who had been working on Broadway in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” was launching a new play by Eugene Ionesco at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Massachusetts. She joined the playwright to see a production of Gertrude Stein’s “In Circles” put on by the patients and staff of the Austen Riggs Mental Health Center in Stockbridge, Mass.

“It was so outstanding,” Ladd recalled on a recent morning, sitting in her sunny living room in Santa Monica, “and I thought, ‘Well, which ones are which?’ And I realized on a certain level you couldn’t tell except that the patients were better at it. So much better.

“And this has been proven out time after time. We’ve seen performances in these hospitals that equaled Marlon Brando. I mean, these were really extraordinary things that just thrilled the soul. The patients’ creativity, as Ionesco said, was from the place that dreams come from.”

When Ladd returned to New York, she walked into the volunteer department at Mt. Sinai Hospital and asked if she could try out some exercises with patients there. Ladd and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Lyle Kessler, continued the exercises for 10 years, and they were the most popular activity among patients. That finding would be replicated when Ladd and Kessler moved to Los Angeles and started the Imagination Workshop at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute in 1979. Even the most severely regressed and withdrawn patients there would participate.

“I told them I’d authorize them to do this if they’d agree to allow the process to be studied and evaluated,” recalls Dr. Louis Jolyon West, former head of psychiatry at UCLA. West says he picked three of the most hard-nosed psychiatrists on his staff to carry out that function. “These guys grudgingly agreed to undertake an evaluation to see whether this would make any difference or not. At the end of a year, they came back and said it really did.”

What the UCLA researchers discovered from their two-year study was that patients preferred the 12-week Imagination Workshop to all other programs, including psychotherapy, occupational training and exercise programs, and that the workshops were clearly beneficial to the patients’ well-being. “It’s hard to say if the value is from the method itself, which is actually difficult to define, or from (Ladd’s and Kessler’s) enthusiasm as people. Their helpfulness and sincerity is genuine. But you put it all together and you have a very salubrious combination of talent and practice,” West says.

UCLA has hosted workshops ever since, and now no one there even asks questions about the program’s role and efficacy in treatment. Over time, program founders Ladd and Kessler turned the program over to others, and though they no longer conduct workshops, they still attend performances and try to solicit funds.

Turf issues--actors vs. therapists--are the focus of some criticism of the Imagination Workshop. “Why don’t they train as therapists?” asks Robert Landy, editor-in-chief of the journal Arts in Psychotherapy and director of the drama therapy program at New York University, one of three in the country. “I think the work of the Imagination Workshop would be more sound if people would take another step and enter into what the therapeutic process is all about: To look at what healing is as practiced psychotherapeutically, rather than simply a positive aesthetic experience.”

Ladd, for one, couldn’t disagree more. “What we decided early on was the most important thing was to not ever become therapists. To never bring it into what this meant about their lives. Not that we don’t value therapy deeply. But it is separate from what we’re doing, and we were not qualified to do that. We were creating a primitive form of folk art, I think.”

Asked to analyze the long-term impact of the Imagination Workshop, some observers of the program leap to praise. Communication skills, self-esteem, memory and empathy all improve as a result, they say. Mental health professionals say they grow more sympathetic to their patients, sometimes even dumbfounded by the workshop’s power.

About five years ago, for example, a patient in the UCLA playwriting workshop wrote a piece he ultimately performed onstage with outpatients. “In the workshop, we all thought his work was wonderful,” recalls UCLA psychiatrist Kissell, who was then the group’s resident doctor. “In the audience, his doctor came up to me after the show and said, ‘You don’t understand. I’ve never seen him so verbal. He sits in my office and doesn’t say anything.’ ”

Others suggest that by providing mental patients and other isolated populations the opportunity to work together, to accept responsibility, to rehearse, to redo, to re-create, the dramatic experience gives the gift of laughter to those who have not smiled in years.

“I learned I have a sense of humor, which I never knew I had,” says Joanne, a 42-year-old participant at the Tuesday night playwriting workshop at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Though her voice sounds flat and distant, she adds: “I’m able to laugh at myself.”

After an hour of rehearsing their show, some of the men and women outpatients in the Tuesday night Imagination Workshop like to grab a smoke outside. During one such break, I wanted to find out why they keep coming back here, often traveling hours by bus, week after week.

“I was in a gang,” 37-year-old Irma Mares tells me, her purple knapsack slung over her shoulder. “I was using alcohol. I come from a dysfunctional family--lots of alcoholism. See, I know my potential. It’s great. But my self-worth tells me, ‘No, why even bother?’ Here, you get to express feelings in yourself. I was afraid to do that as a kid. I was afraid people would laugh.”

For 20-year-old Adrian, the program “is sort of scary, in a way. But it deals with a lot of my fears I need to get out. Fear of humans. Fear of life in general, I guess.” For his performance piece, Adrian would choose a character called Creep Into My Eye who “can burn your brain and make you die.”

“For a lot of these people,” says Jeff Katzman, the workshop’s resident psychiatrist, “this is the most important thing in their life--a group of people who help them feel safe to express themselves. That’s not easily done in this world.” And for himself? “In general in medicine, you can afford yourself clinical distance. Here, you’re on equal ground in your imagination. They’re incredible--much quicker than I am. So, it shows me who they are as people, not patients, which is a rare opportunity.”

At the group’s final performance, there is an astonishing blend of the bizarre and the possible, with colorful masks, the rhythmic pounding of drums, the tinkling of chimes and dreamlike expressions of emotion. A sampling of parting shots onstage:

“Whether you’re sleeping or awake, be careful.”

“The whole world is corrosive--don’t keep me posted.”

“Open your heart and be who you are.”

IT IS 7 A.M. WHEN ACTOR MEL Johnson Jr. turns his gray Toyota Land Cruiser onto the Ventura Freeway for the 90-minute drive to Patton State Hospital. Johnson, who was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in the film “Total Recall” and has just directed Jason Alexander in the one-man show “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,” first began working with the Imagination Workshop seven years ago when he moved to Los Angeles from New York.

“You have to put back,” he says, when asked why he devotes two days a week to this work. “You have to put it back out there and just spread it around. And it’s helping people. Not to sound goody-two-shoes, but that’s the reason. You see the results. You have to be able to find the time in your life to do these kinds of things, because being obsessed with work, work, work--it’s not going to happen. At the same time, it helps your work, because when we act with these patients, you see this absolute raw honesty come out.”

For some artists, the workshops offer respite from the glossy nature of Hollywood. “I feel like I’m doing something real,” says screenwriter-turned-rabbinical student Marc Sirinsky, a 10-year Imagination veteran who wears a Jewish skullcap, or yarmulke , of purple-and-blue striped Guatemalan fabric. “In Hollywood, it can be so elusive what you’re doing. I mean, you can feel like you’re not connecting to anything in the real world. So, to have this connection with real people in the real world with real issues is very humbling. It’s grounding.” Sirinsky also invokes a basic tenet of Judaism-- tikkun olam , which means “repair the world.”

Others say the Imagination Workshop is a two-way process, providing them with inspiration. Many speak of characters and scripts for TV shows and movies that have come directly from their experiences in the program. Imagination Workshop co-founder Lyle Kessler says his play “Orphans” and his first feature film script, “Touched,” were based on his work with psychiatric patients. And Kessler’s upcoming film “The Saint of Fort Washington,” which he wrote and directed and which stars Danny Glover and Matt Dillon, is about the relationship between a black middle-aged man and a young schizophrenic in a New York shelter for the homeless.

“The point is not that we use people as material but that you learn that everybody has a story,” says actor-writer Jonathan Zeichner. “We usually think of these people as them: It’s us and them. But the fact is it’s really all us.”

Like several Imagination Workshop artists, Zeichner knows firsthand about such distinctions. The son of a psychologist, he has a brother who has been on the streets and in the mental health system for 25 years. “I’ve tried over those years in many different ways to have a positive impact on his life,” he says. “You do what you can, but it’s sort of crisis management when he’s been arrested or hospitalized or gotten beat up. I tell you, I felt like I was home when I got involved with this.”

Adds Michael Barker, a theater arts teacher at Windward School in Mar Vista and a regular workshop participant: “In my family, I’ve contended with mental illness all my life. Maybe I couldn’t give back directly to my family, but I could in a broader way. It’s a way of giving back something other than cash.”

Still others insist that any portrayal of them as purely altruistic care-givers is completely misleading. “You can’t fix your own family,” says Susan Arnold, the casting-director-turned-film producer whose younger sister is developmentally disabled, “but you give what you can give. And I feel like I get so much back for myself. There’s a sense of joy that comes with the work. A sense of admiration for people’s struggles. And respect. You do the work, and you’re healed, too, because there’s such acceptance. It’s like a program that nurtures people’s souls.”

Actor Daniel Stern, perhaps best known for his role as one of the loopy burglars in “Home Alone,” participated in a workshop at Camarillo earlier this year as a guest artist with his wife, Laure, who is an Imagination Workshop board member. For him, as for Arnold, the lure of the process was as much in what the artists get as what they give.

“In the car driving up, I was told I’d be doing improv, which I don’t really do,” Stern said recently. “But theater is a primal force, which I tend to forget, acting in movies. There is some kind of magic in that community force, and it is the theater.”

He continued, only half-jokingly. “So, during my improv with a patient, I was in a monster costume. And I found myself saying, ‘How come I always have to be the monster and you get to be the good-looking guy?’ And I realized, this is kind of my own therapy.”

DRIVING BACK TO LOS ANgeles from Camarillo State Hospital one day, McCusker, Zeichner and Bowles are exchanging war stories. “One day,” McCusker remembers, “this guy was delusional and he was really sexual with me.”

What did he do?

“He said real explicit sexual things about what he’d like to do.”

“He was hallucinating at the time,” Zeichner reminds her.

“But he also said it to me. He said, ‘Can you taste me?’ ”

How to deal with such encounters is part of a year-long training for Imagination Workshop artists. Every Wednesday morning, new recruits gather in McCusker’s apartment in the Fairfax district for two hours to practice exercises, to discuss methodology and programs, to learn how to respond if a patient is withdrawn, hallucinating or uncooperative. But mostly they learn to trust their instincts and to intervene at a critical moment.

Such an intervention, says sculptor and artist Mindy Alper, saved her life. Five years ago, she recalls: “I had a really huge breakdown. A nervous breakdown. I don’t know what that means. But all kinds of things broke. My speech center shut off. I couldn’t speak. And I couldn’t write. It was related to trauma--a whole lot of stuff that happened at the time really triggered growing-up kind of stuff that I didn’t remember.”

Alper, now 33, declines to offer more specifics. But at the time, she found herself catatonic, hospitalized in a locked ward and suddenly forced to attend an Imagination Workshop session. “There I am, and I kinda see I’m with a bunch of people who will be participating in something. And I didn’t see how that was possible for me.” Neither did the hospital staff.

“She had just been admitted,” recalls Sirinsky, sitting now in a Silver Lake coffee shop beside Alper, who has since become both his neighbor and his friend. “We were told, ‘There’s this new woman. Don’t touch her. She’ll freak out if you touch her. And she can’t talk. And just be warned: It’ll be very bad if anyone comes near her.’ ”

When the workshop started, the first thing Sirinsky did was take her hands. “She was crying out in some way that I heard,” Sirinsky says simply. Adds Alper: “I think the thing was, he instinctively knew that this is a person who needs to have contact more than anything on the planet. And I did. I never had anybody safe to do that, really, or else I wouldn’t let anybody do that. That was the beginning of me being able to have contact, not just in a physical way--but in an emotional way with everybody. I knew I had an imagination, and I knew I was creative. But I sort of didn’t know it, either. But I didn’t have an interactive way to express it, either.”

She pauses for a moment and then worries that she’s sounding too sappy. “It really is a much bigger thing than I could ever tell you.” Still, her first step was small.

During her initial workshop, Alper would neither speak nor move. But she was given an assignment, to play Snow White in a wheelchair opposite Sirinsky’s comical, slithering creature. Together, they were to cross a stream. “I was going to get you across that stream, hell or high water,” Sirinsky remembers, laughing.

Alper cracks a sly smile. “I was surprised to see this grown man crawling on the floor, like a worm,” she says. “It was the best impression of a worm I had ever seen. That was a really comforting thing, ‘cause I thought, ‘Here I am in the loony bin, and this guy who’s supposed to be normal is crawling around like a worm. Either I’m not so bad or he needs to be here.’ ”

Us or them, indeed.