A New Play: "The Patient" by Lawrence Kessenich and Doug Holder

Paul Victor Walsh (center-as the patient) Greg Hovanesian (as Leon--the mental health worker),
Lis Adams (the nurse). Presented as a staged reading by the Playwright's Platform of Boston. Imagine working at a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston, and you are stuck with a patient who picks you apart for eight hours on the night shift.
Who in the end would have the upperhand?
Here is a short clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Z9ToHN99I


" Really enjoyed it. It has great potential." Lauren Elias ( Founder of the Hub Theatre Company--Boston)





Reviewed by Playwright, Mary M. McCullough Mary McCullough (Co-founder of the Streetfeet Women) http://www.streetfeetwomen.org


The Patient, a play adapted by Lawrence Kessenich from a short story by Doug Holder, has three characters. LEON, a mental health generalist, as he refers to himself, sleeps days in his boarding house room. He is getting a graduate degree in American Literature, while working nights in a mental hospital. His work entails sitting by the bedside of a drugged and bound PATIENT. Other than speaking directly to the audience, his only interactions are with the patient and an overly friendly NURSE who attempts to engage Leon in her social life, outside the hospital. The play raises questions about sanity. When the patient wakes to confront Leon, the patient’s questions and analysis of Leon life threatens Leon’s fragile sense of himself. Leon tells him to go back to sleep but who is really asleep? The patient is more alive and more rational than Leon, asserting that Leon can choose to live differently. He also tells Leon that his boarding house room is a “suicide suite.” Leon, in a beautifully written, poetic monologue, early in the play, confirms he is “dreaming of remote possibilities that are actual dead ends.” Is Leon a suicide candidate? The play leaves one thinking that Leon and the patient are opposite sides of the same coin; and that the coin is about to be flipped. The play is well written and very intriguing.



Congratulations to Lawrence Kessenich (playwright) and Doug Holder (memoir author) for the 26 minute actors’ reading last night of THE PATIENT: a wonderful story brought powerfully to the stage. I loved the contrasts between monologue, where the young writer character, appeals to audience sympathy for his lonely and hardscrabble life; and dialogue, as he is upstaged by a restrained and sedated mental patient, whom he’s supposed to watch all night—his miserable job. Where the writer has been appealing to “us” to listen and commiserate with his situation, the patient reads his character, even in silence, all too well, and berates him for self-pity: no girl, shacked up in some “suicide suite.” Get a life! Finally a nurse sedates the patient, leaving him silent, while the writer’s eyes fill with tears. I was reminded of that scene in Richard Yates’s REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, where the self-doubting Frank Wheeler is critiqued and exposed by a mental patient on family furlough--arguably the best scene in Sam Mendes’s film version, with Givings, the patient, played by Michael Shannon......DeWitt Henry .... (Founder of Ploughshares Magazine.)




The play takes place in 1985 at a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston....


"-Beautifully written prose (Leon's monologues)"




"This is one of the better plays I've read this season. It's very well done. A psychological sketch with a bit of suspense. I really enjoyed it."


It's very sad, but I really the stark realism of it. Plus, the characters are so distinctively different.

----Pittsburgh New Works Festival









I appreciate the setup - nighttime, nightshift, a kind of "No Exit" hell, yes? Great intensity of the dyadic encounter; one tied up, one free, in a sense, but not, really. Because we're all human. Because sanity/insanity is on a spectrum. Your characters know that. We all have secrets. We all fear being exposed. Having also worked in an inpatient setting (many years ago) as a therapist on an adolescent substance abuse unit, I totally get the fraught nature of this encounter. -- Kelly Dumar--- Producer Our Voices Festival of Boston Area Women Playwrights,-- Wellesley College