Many writers and performers in the theater, usually out of economic necessity, balance their artistic work with second jobs such as waiting tables or temporary office help–employment that can be dropped or picked up as needed. But Jeff Berkson, a playwright and songwriter with five successfully produced shows to his credit, is a committed and seasoned professional in another, very demanding line of work. Since 1966, Berkson has been a practicing psychiatric social worker specializing in children; for the last 12 years he has been director of the inpatient adolescent psychiatry program at Evanston Hospital, a position that keeps him on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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What the people in Pastel Refugees resemble more than anything else is a family. That’s very deliberate, notes Greg Fleming, coauthor of the show’s script and a mental health worker in the hospital unit that Berkson runs. “The longer I work in this field, the more aware I become of the importance of family systems,” Fleming says. “Often children become the ‘symptom bearers’ of a family–if there’s a problem in the family, like an alcoholic parent, the child becomes the identified sick person.” But, Berkson and Fleming emphasize, their job isn’t to place blame on parents; rather, it’s to rebuild a disrupted family unit, and helping a child learn to trust and to function in a family-style group can be the basis for that rebuilding process.
The central part of the program Berkson directs at Evanston Hospital is a group therapy session that meets for an hour and a half daily. When they began to write Pastel Refugees, Berkson and Fleming decided to set the show in a group session because of its important function in their program and because it was the most dramatically viable way to let their characters interact. “They tell their stories,” Berkson says, “and they react to each other. They do a lot of that.” Indeed, capturing the explosive and often humorous spontaneity of a group of teenagers bouncing stories off each other was the most challenging part of writing Pastel Refugees.
Rock, rap, “headbanger” heavy metal, blues, and punk figure prominently in Berkson’s score (one song is called “What’s Wrong With Slam Dancing on School Nights”). And the 44-year-old Berkson admits that whenever he tended to get musically old-fashioned–his own roots are in 1960s rock and folk–he faced candid criticism from his 14-year-old keyboardist son, Daniel, and Daniel’s guitarist partner, David Myers, students at Evanston Township High School who contributed fresh and sometimes fierce tracks to the taped instrumental sound track that accompanies the onstage singers. “They kept me honest,” Berkson says, a certain tension in his laugh.
Pastel Refugees opens April 12 and runs through May 14 at the Northlight, 2300 Green Bay Road, in Evanston (with previews April 7, 8, 9, and 11). There are special group rates for schools, youth groups, and social service agencies, and half-price single tickets for teenagers are available for all performances. For more information, call 869-7278.
