Metatheater and Madness: Ozzy Wagner’s Surreal Approach as a Playwright

Ozzy Wagner is no stranger to surrealist theatre, but a recent experience with the psychiatric system made for fertile ground to explore. That experience resulted in GROUP, one of four plays selected for the Disabled Playwrights Workshop. Wagner describes GROUP as the only thing they could have written after that experience. 

“GROUP is a short play about a psychiatric hospital stay, in which we, the audience, become ‘cured’ the more monstrous the patients appear to us…This is one of the first projects I’ve completed since my own brush with the psychiatric system, and as such it probably couldn’t be about anything else,” they said. “I’ve been really interested in the history of psychiatry and Mad Pride and the rejection of the biomedical model since then, so this play sort of stemmed from that. The style of the play is very much in line with other plays I’ve written over the last few years, but the experience of being in this environment and of being in an altered mental state really lend themselves to an experimental style, I think.” 

While Wagner is still exploring how to use surrealistic techniques in their work, they are enjoying the journey and finding it resonates well with past experiences. 

“Even when I was a little kid, my stories were basically transcriptions of my dreams, which made no literal sense but felt expansive and emotional in ways I enjoyed,” they said. “In college I learned about playwrights and movements that rejected the ‘narrative arc’ and that used metatheater and gibberish and other unconventional devices, which really gave me permission to write stories in a way that felt exciting and natural and surprising.”

To that end, GROUP employs a lot of audience interpretation. Doctors observe the audience, writing notes on those who seem reluctant to comply with instructions. A therapist addresses the audience directly. At the end, the audience is invited to take part in a violent communion. Wagner said there are a couple of reasons they use techniques like this in their work. 

“Partly because you have a captive audience and can implicate them in a way you can’t in other mediums, and partly because a lot of my work is about saying ‘hey you, let’s interrogate how you see things’ which lends itself to direct address,” they said. 

Wagner also noted GROUP’s surrealistic structure, though difficult to follow from a straight linear perspective, still follows a strong emotional throughline. 

“I think, as I write, I tend to latch onto a particular idea or journey or some means of making the story fall off a cliff into something else, and progress towards that instead of towards a more traditional, logical climax,” they said. “They definitely still make ‘sense’ in my head, whether I’m driving a particular idea home or shedding light on a certain kind of experience, but the ‘logic’ is one of images or accumulation or change or atmosphere, rather than the literal meaning of the words.”

With the way they’ve been exploring what Mad Pride means to them, the Disabled Playwrights Workshop felt like the perfect place to showcase their work, and paired with Director Figaro Vance, they appreciated the opportunity to refine GROUP as they went. 

“Playwriting festivals are already one of my favorite things to do, but festivals like this specifically are also an opportunity to feel a part of a community, which even over the course of a few short days can be a powerful experience,” they said. “Being a part of this was sort of a one-two punch of both having the opportunity to work with Figaro and the cast to finish the piece and hear it aloud, but also of accepting and sharing this new part of me with others.”

“I hope that audience members who do have a hearing impairment will feel they’ve been represented realistically and respectfully but not too seriously; and that audience members without a hearing impairment will feel empathy but not sympathy, and also realize that despite how people with hearing impairments communicate or how we sound, we are wise beyond our ears,” she said. “And perhaps one day I’ll take this play beyond its initial ten minutes and we’ll follow Ada on her date and whatever happens next. After all, developing a short play into a full-length play is not unheard of.”

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