Studio Theatre’s literary director, Adrien-Alice Hansel, interviewed playwright Matthew Capodicasa about his new comedy, The Scenarios, and the inspiration for it.
“I had a day job working for a social services agency in New York City as an administrative assistant,” Capodicasa said. “They also had a contract from the NY Police Department to do what’s called CIT, or Crisis Intervention Training, and the idea is to give police officers a crash course on the signs of mental illness so that when what the MPD calls an EDP, an Emotionally Distressed Person, and talking with officers saying things like, ‘If someone is having a kind of psychotic break, screaming at them to comply is not going to produce a result of compliance.'”
“So… they would bring in actors who would roleplay with the cops. They have book of scenarios organized by disorder, and the actors and officers would get a prompt and go from there.”
“And I noticed a few things. The trainings themselves were in that uncanny valley, and also kind of moving in a way that everyone was on best behavior. So if you sit there in one of these role-playing moments, you watch and give over to it and think, ‘This could work; these trainings could work. They care.’ And they definitely did. And with the scenarios, you really get the sense that they’re all in it together, they’re like a troupe. But of course they weren’t.”
“There was an imbalance of experience, the actors are acting, the cops are acting as well, but the cops are cops. So it’s weird because there isn’t really the sense of risk to the cops, so who knows how they’d really respond under actual conditions, because there’s no risk in the training scenarios.”
“I also started to interact with the actors a little and learned that a lot of them gravitated toward this job because they had some sort of intersection with one of those worlds, either the criminal justice or the behavioral health world themselves, or they knew someone who had, a family member or something. They had some skin in the game.”
“The play is not a soapbox play; it’s ultimately more a play about the strangeness of pretending to be other people, and the added strangeness of having to prove your own humanity to another human, as well as the effects and the cost of coming up with that proof.”
Hansel’s interview with Capodicasa in its entirety, along with more information about this critically-praised new comedy now playing at Studio Theatre, is available at studiotheatre.org. Tickets for The Scenarios are on sale now through the show close on April 6.
