Now Appearing: Your Psyche--Live!

Life imitates art. Or is it art that imitates life? Or is art life?

For less than the price of a song or a movie ticket, Dr. Stella Resnick lets you “grapple” with that issue and a host of salient others in an intimate theater setting.

Resnick has been hosting something she calls Talk Theater on Wednesday nights at West Hollywood’s Tracy Roberts Theater for about two months now. She bills the event as “an interactive experience investigating love and lust.”

Starting out with a small mailing and building her audience through word of mouth, Resnick (past president of the Group Therapy Psychotherapy Assn. of Southern California) counts on the scintillating, topical issues to bring in the numbers. Recent subjects collectively pondered include “The New Age of Uncertainty: Turning Fear Into Excitement” and “Significant Pleasures and Meaningful Joys: Depth Without Pain.”

Ushering therapy into a theater setting, Resnick believes, helps participants view their concerns (not problems --that word is taboo in her lexicon) through a brand-new prism.

In the beginning, she says, “They come from a point of view of ‘What’s wrong with me?’ But really,” she attempts to assure them, “we’re doing the best we can.”

Resnick looks at it as a forum “to have a situation where one can say: ‘This is what I think. This is what I feel.’ Grappling with issues. Not from a pathology, or a victim’s place, but a place where I can learn . . . the challenge and how can I make the most of it.”

Talk Theater is a clever, ‘90s revamping of an interactive round-table Resnick produced about 15 years ago at the Committee Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach. “It was the early ‘70s and . . . it was very hip. I took their dark night and did something called Gestalt Games. I engaged people and I got them to play games with each other . . . people who came weren’t just spectators,

but also participants.”

The ‘90s offer a different challenge. “At the end of the millennium, the rules (in relationships) have changed and nothing new has come in their place.”

With Talk Theater, Resnick hopes to “get these new ways of thinking out, to grapple with . . . issues in a fun, non-confrontive, creative, exploring way.”

Admittedly, though the setting is modest--75 seats and a spare stage with a collection of patio chairs--the session is imbued with a touch of the free-wheeling spectacle.

“People were always saying: ‘Stella, you should have your own TV talk show’ . . . so in lieu of being offered anything,” Resnick says with a laugh, “I thought, why not in the theater?”

Stepping out in front of her audience of 30 or so, Resnick takes a seat on the stool with the ease of a seasoned emcee. (You half expect her to wait for a band to pipe down before offering the evening’s greeting.)

Instead of talking about “our hurts and our disappointments,” Resnick preaches the importance of exploring the positive. The pleasures.

“We’re going to kick around some of the good stuff.” This evening’s topic: “Evocative Intimacy: The Challenge of a Stimulating Relationship.”

After putting her spin on the issue (“intimacy is about discovering ourselves in the presence of others”), Resnick likes to open the floor to questions, comments, anecdotes. She keeps the issues popping with enthusiastic affirmations and reassuring asides: “There are no easy answers to this. . . . We deserve to have our fears.”

At first the audience is slow to open up, but as soon as they recognize their hidden thoughts and fears emerging from the lips of others, hands shoot up, comments spring from the sidelines as the audience and their inner issues symbolically take center stage.

For the final segment, Resnick offers the floor to three “courageous volunteers” to “go deeper.” And although the goings-on have less of the manic, three-ring-circus, TV-talk-show current, the proceedings still get heated, dramatic, uncomfortably poignant.

One couple works out a decade of marital miscommunication--the wife from the stage, the husband from the darkened depths of the audience. A man, who after “thousands of dollars” of therapy in hopes to become “more empathetic,” takes this moment to express a vexing concern: “It took me six weeks to learn how to ask open-ended questions and to identify ‘feeling words.’ . . . But it’s taken me seven years to pay attention to the answer. . . . I’m a good actor, but I’m not getting what I want.”

Amid much laughter and tangential dialogue erupting in hot spots throughout the audience, Resnick knows that the mere step of having people face one another and opening them up--if only a crack--is a start down the long road toward change.

“I wanted to give people an opportunity to look at these issues, not from the point of blaming, or fault-finding. That’s wasted time and wasted energy,” Resnick says. “It’s so interesting when you start not by giving the answers, but by asking the questions. Allowing for everyone’s thought process. People play off each others ideas and emotions. And pleasure is the key here.”