Tonight we are going to play “This Is Your Life” for neurotics. I’m at the Jacob L. Moreno Institute in Beacon, New York. As per usual, my timing is somewhat off: Jacob L. Moreno died two days ago. You win some, you lose some. Fortunately Mrs. Zerka Moreno is a trouper; the show will go on. And on. The theater looks like an old borscht circuit hotel on its 30 valuable acres. Moreno’s special stage is made up of concentric platforms, with one balcony above in case God or your dead father has to make a cameo appearance.
Thirty-five people in attendance for the public Saturday night show. About one third of those are student interns. They’re a huggy, braless-shoeless group; they’d embrace you to ask the time of day. Along with psychodrama, Dr. Moreno invented sociometry, a kind of 12-inch ruler used to measure social relations. Sociogram charts paper the wall: blue lines (bad vibes), red lines (good vibes) joining and rejoining the names of 20 students. “Criterion: to share a massage with.” All those interconnecting lines; it must be like a chiropractic free-for-all here on workdays. Again and again handout literature refers to Dr. Moreno as the “contemporary of Freud.” This isn’t exactly a recommendation. I’m Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary. It hasn’t improved my fiction.
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