Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

Evidence both anecdotal and scientific describes a contemporary way of life with all the substance of a plastic Easter egg: a shiny manufactured surface with tainted air inside. The “happy talk” of American television news broadcasters has either infected masses of humanity in the industrialized world or, more likely, it is reflecting a zeitgeist of cheery misery, high-energy vacuity, surface competence and interior collapse. Everything is fine, we chirp at one another, smiling smiles (to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce) like silver nameplates on our coffins.

A Crisis of Loneliness

At the same time, popular voices have risen to cry out the subtle danger that faces us in a world that allows us to go days, weeks at a time without uttering a meaningful word to anyone. The cardio­logist Dean Ornish has become fairly obsessed with the medical effects of aloneness on human health. In two best-selling books of the 1990s, he amassed the existing scientific data on this question and added his own clinical observations from his work with heart-disease patients. In 2000, Robert Putnam’s densely researched and lucidly argued Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community was perhaps the first academic cultural study to become a national bestseller since Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937) offered sweeping before-and-after views of community life in Muncie, Indiana.²

Ornish found that though the matter of human connectedness remained an under-researched issue, the patterns that emerge in public health research suggest the following: (1) That contemporary people in industrialized nations are less connected to others, both in terms of intimate contacts and in friendly social organization, than were their parents or any discernable previous generation; (2) That this social and personal isolation has led to a proliferation of disease that is otherwise unexplainable in terms of genetics, diet, or other environmental factors; and (3) That actions taken to improve one’s feelings of social connectedness and human intimacy improve not only the person’s life satisfaction and sense of wholeness, but also improve treatment outcomes and prevention of potential disease.³