The Patient Gloria: A Cautionary Tale for the Modern Woman
“The Patient Gloria”, playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in association with Pan Pan Theatre, is presciently timed, though not for the reasons its author intended. Gina Moxley’s would-be anthem to female empowerment and liberation inadvertently tells a cautionary tale of modern womanhood.
Our protagonist and occasional narrator Gloria introduces herself: “California 1964. Love has vacated my life. I pack my three kids in the car and head west. After a lot of broken crockery — guilty — I leave my husband, marriage and the Catholic Church. I’m a single woman. Thirty. Flirty. Chain-smoking. Broke and horny.”
Based upon actual psych patient Gloria Szymanski, Gloria has been recruited by her psychotherapist to take part in a series of training films with different giants in the field: Dr. Carl Rogers, Dr. Fritz Perls, and Dr. Albert Ellis. “The poster girl for psychotherapy!” she exclaims excitedly. “I thought, sure, Gloria, you can do this…and I have to admit, I really liked smart men.”
Gloria agrees to film three sessions under one condition — they are to be used only as training material in psychology classes. She reveals her innermost struggles, including guilt she experienced after lying to her fourth-grade daughter, who asked, “Mommy, did you ever go to bed with anyone besides daddy?”
Unbeknown to Gloria, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, or The Gloria Films, will ultimately be broadcast on television and released into theaters across the country.
The piece, which fittingly debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe, is narrated by Moxley herself, who draws from her experience as an Irish woman in the 1970’s. Breaking a sort of “fifth wall,” she controls the play’s action, showing us how the sausage is made (sometimes literally, as she converses with the audience over a penis made from stockings). She embodies each of the three therapists with progressing degrees of acerbity until she becomes nearly unwatchable.
Despite a characteristically high production value, Moxley’s writing hobbles the piece beyond repair, leaving director John McIlduff with little to work with. Her attempt to interweave multiple narrators and many disparate components — rambling monologues from her multiple narrators, the disassociated storyline of punk bassist Jane Deasy, and three separate therapy sessions — fails to evoke the desired indignation. The script is tired and riddled with platitudes, like “nevertheless, she persisted,” and the obligatory mention of men “legislating their way into your uterus.” Where the writing is coherent, it is permeated by bitterness — a distinctly different feeling from righteous anger.
And then, there are the penises. Written into the script are dildos representing each therapist — one sewn out of a stocking (and some rice for gravity), one stretchy silicone member swung about like a lasso, and one on a high-flying drone. I’ll let your imagination take it from there. Suffice it to say the effect is gratuitous.
"The Patient Gloria" presents an accidental microcosm of a larger cultural phenomenon — significant gains in women’s rights haven’t made women any happier. In fact, their measures of satisfaction have fallen both absolutely and relatively to men as attitudes toward birth control, motherhood, divorce and religion change rapidly.
Gloria is one of many (men and women alike) dismantling the roles essential for human flourishing, and conflating dutiful individual freedom with thoughtless personal autonomy. The consequences are dire. She resents her children. She seeks a substitute father-figure in her therapists. She has sex with men who devalue her.
Moxley’s messaging is clear, even if the truths she exposes are not the ones she intends. Maybe the things that we “modern women” run from are what imbue our lives with purpose after all. “I remember when the truth had consequences,” she says at the eleventh hour. #MeToo, Gina. Me too.
Additional Information:
Theater: St. Ann’s Warehouse
Off Broadway, Play
Run Time: 75 Minutes, No Intermission
Opening: November 20th, 2022
Closing: December 4th, 2022
Image: Teddy Wolff