Tonight at The Greene Space at WNYC/WQXR, I saw my friends Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s new play The Working Group, about a fictional televised men’s therapy group. Normally I’d write a long-winded review, but there was only one performance and it has been recorded and uploaded in its entirety—indeed, this appears to be the ideal format to watch the play—so I’ll just share the whole thing instead. It’s an hour long.
I’m still turning it over in my head. Among other things, The Working Group is a scathing satire of the way doctors, journalists, critics, and Twitterers intimidate people with close scrutiny, with the ostensible aim of exposing the truths people lie to themselves about. But there’s a very fine line between lying and the genuine fallibility of human memory, and Peter’s therapist character is every bit as savage in blurring that line to obliterate each character’s trust in their own self-perception as every abusive critic is in real life. It’s easy to miss that the same emotional trickery cult leaders use to artificially dispel intrusive thoughts is also used to create them.