Staging medicine as a neurologist and playwright

Ever wonder what kind of perspective a neurologist would bring to the stage as a playwright? If so, the work of Dr. Suvendrini Lena may provide some insights, as she has held the role of neurologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Women’s College Hospital for about a decade, and her third play, Rubble was just put on stage in Toronto.

In a podcast put out by the Aluna Theatre, Dr. Lena shines a light on her background, work, art, and perspective.

“I think that the skills I have as a writer in theater help me with medicine, and my experience in medicine obviously informs the writing,” Lena says in the podcast episode.

As a Sri Lankan of Tamil and Singhalese origin, Lena reflects on how her parents expected her to pursue a technical profession with a high degree of stability, especially as their oldest daughter. Since Lena always wanted to be a writer, it was just a question of not giving up on that dream while she negotiated her responsibilities to both herself and her family. “[It was about] trying to always create a space to be a writer, and then as I've gotten older, trying to extend that space and develop skills, and also create that space for others too,” she says.

Her earlier works, The Enchanted Loom and Here are the Fragments, have featured physicians, but it’s all braided together beyond the field of medicine for Lena. “Being collaborative is good for the art, but it's also helpful for me because it means that I don't have to carry the responsibility of everything myself,” Lena explains.

In The Enchanted Loom, a Sri Lankan refugee has post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE), which can occur as a complication of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this case, the TBI was from political torture and caused lesions in the brain. Both of his physicians in Canada share his experience of being displaced persons, which Lena notes is common in the medical profession in Toronto, as there are many foreign medical graduates from a variety of countries that have faced post-colonial conflicts, which bring them to Canada.

Here are the Fragments was an immersive installation with a main character who is a Black psychiatrist that is originally from Martinique, like Franz Fanon. “He comes to Toronto and experiences a great deal of racism in the process of practicing medicine,” explains Lena.

In this work, Lena notes that one of the voices that speaks to the main character in his psychosis is Franz Fanon, with whom he has conversations about what is happening. “The reason why it was presented in an immersive environment was that I didn't want to create this voyeurism of the audience watching a Black man experience psychosis,” she says. Lena admits that balancing her roles as both a neurologist and playwright has been “a perpetual state of unbalance” given the intensive nature of workshopping and production schedules.

But she doesn’t bring these neurology-informed plays to life alone.

With both The Enchanted Loom and Here Are the Fragments, Lena illuminates how physicians are never just objective actors. “We all have our biases and our motivations that are informed by our personal histories. They're human beings just as much as anybody else,” she explains.

Ariel Landrum, MA, LMFT, a certified art therapist and the clinical director of Guidance Teletherapy, says, “Doctors are healthcare professionals that we rely on to keep us well. Performance art that humanizes doctors allows us to connect with them as individuals. When a doctor writes the narrative themselves, we can get a more accurate look at their struggles in their personal and professional lives. When we experience the narrative from a woman of color, we are immersed in the richness of the story that we can relate to.”

In her work as a playwright, Lena has tried to humanize healthcare practitioners. “If they don't see themselves as human or don't have the space to have human feelings, they're going to have a hard time treating their patients as humans as well,” she says.

“As an art therapist, I learned that humans gravitate towards art that moves us. Art therapists also learn that we need our experience validated. When doctors are humanized in narrative and expressive art, our world is validated for us,” Landrum notes.

Lena’s third play does not feature any physicians, but continues her tradition of including an element of science, as one of the main characters is an archaeologist. “She's interested in history and human remains as a way of establishing truth,” Lena explains.

The plays are influenced by Lena’s experience as a neurologist, but her work as a physician is also influenced — by her playwriting world.

“I'm most conscious of it when I'm communicating. In theater, there's a great deal of attention paid to dialogue, and the context for things, like how people are seated, how people are dressed, how actions are related to the things that people say, and the tensions, the things that are interesting or don't make sense. I probably think [more] about my interactions with patients, and maybe I'm more conscious of those elements. I also think it can lead to more effective communication, and I think that maybe I have a slightly more holistic approach to my role as a physician, as I see it as [only] part of a person's healing journey,” Lena says.

Lena notes that biases in healthcare are structural, but she hopes that the stage can illuminate this, as theatrical tools may help to bridge the gaps between culture, neuroscience, and art.

Staging medicine as a neurologist and playwright

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