therapy

Aiming to Float is the first dramatic reading in the series, Advance Theatre: New Works by Women. Written by Janet Hinton after having experience both as a patient and an instructor at a pain clinic, Aiming to Float examines a number of common themes against the backdrop of life altering pain.

Seven months after ‘the accident’ Seamus is not the man he used to be and Chris is still on the waiting list for therapy at a pain clinic. Unable to function as a mother, wife, money-earner, or school volunteer, pain and dysfunction have become the norm for Chris....

This play is a lament for the painful consequences that radiate in all directions from a violence-infused culture. It’s a reflection on frustration, anger, abandonment, hidden disabilities, and sexual violence. It reveals a struggle to understand the causes of pain across four lives: a dead American soldier, perhaps by suicide, perhaps involved in Abu Ghraib atrocities in the US/Gulf War; his wife, perhaps unloved, a young woman, now a therapist, emotionally abandoned by her father; the soldier’s artistically-inclined, identical, gay twin brother (wouldn’t they both be gay?) worrying about his life; and the father of the brothers, a Vietnam veteran...