Almost 30 years after his death, and 80 years after his early research at Harvard, BF Skinner still looms large over our contemporary understanding of behavior. One of the most discussed looks at what he taught us and how those lessons have reverberated with later experimental psychologists – and why we still don’t always want to see it – is Lauren Slater’s 2004 book Opening Skinner’s Box.
Extending a long, fruitful relationship, the Wexner Center brings back the UK’s Improbable Theatre to close the 2017-18 theatrical season with their acclaimed adaptation of Slater’s book. I spoke with Lee Simpson, Artistic Director of Improbable and co-director of the piece, by phone.
The New York Times called the book, “very readable, if highly personal, account of what we know, and don’t know, about human nature, and of the ethical issues raised by our efforts to find out more.” Simpson said, “Phelim [McDermott, co-director] was struck by [Opening Skinner’s Box]; the book turned us on. The experiments were fascinating and the way Lauren Slater puts herself into the experiments. [In doing so, it] raises questions about objectivity and subjectivity and how heavy the quotation marks are around ‘science’. Especially psychology.”
Talking about Skinner’s “radical behaviorism,” Simpson said, “Eventually the rat will learn to push a lever to get food. No such thing as free will. Every single thing we do, we do because we’ve been rewarded. In 1950s America, if you said there’s no free will, people got hot under the collar. I imagine they’d get hot under the collar if you said it now. He tried to sell a baby box. There was an urban legend he experimented on his own daughter who then killed herself. That daughter, Debra Skinner, sued Lauren Slater for mentioning these rumors even though Slater explicitly said they weren’t true.”
“Lauren Slater hasn’t seen [the adaptation] to the best of our knowledge. But Debra Skinner saw the show.” Chuckling, Simpson said, “She had notes for us. She said she loved the box, and she loved the show.”
Talking about the raison d’etre for this piece, Simpson said, “There are ideas to communicate here – though they’re mid-century ideas – as a culture, we haven’t dealt with. They’re still shocking.” Throughout the text is a harrowing realization that, as Simpson said, “We are not rational beings. We are rationalizing beings. Most of us will not change our minds. We will hang on till death.”
Simpson said Leon Festinger’s research about cognitive dissonance underlined this rationalizing nature. Festinger studied a small apocalypse cult in the 50s who held to their beliefs with greater fervor when the apocalypse didn’t arrive. “Cognitive dissonance is disturbingly relevant. Both our regimes [in the US and UK] are through-going incompetent in every way. We think if we point out their illogical opinions and contradictions, their arguments will fall apart. It doesn’t work, and big and little ‘l’ liberals scratch our heads. I’m looking at a snowy scene in London – yesterday we were colder than the North Pole. Yet we climate change isn’t accepted as truth.”
These rationalizations extend to behavior on a smaller, interpersonal level. The first thing Simpson brought up when asked about the relevance of these experiments was “Milgram shock. Stanley Milgram had people apply ‘electric shock’ to actors, but the people in the experiment didn’t know they were acting and not really getting shocked. 65% of the participants shocked another human being to ‘death’ in increments because they were told.”
Audience members used to the wild, visual flights of Improbable’s work – in hits like Shockheaded Peter (where I first became enraptured by the group at the Wexner Center) and the Metropolitan Opera productions of Glass’ Satyagraha or Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte – are in for a surprise.
When Simpson was asked to describe Opening Skinner’s Box, the first word to come to mind was “Atypical. This is very sober and restrained. Often, our work is free-wheeling and almost baroque in its visual language. The content led us to make something more stark.”
“We use six performers, costumed as bow-tied Harvard professor types. They step in and out of characters in a very fluid way. Because we’re dealing with science, we wanted it to be scientifically watertight as much as it can be. We wrote a script and said learn the words – not a phrase that comes up often in our work. But we had them improvise how they move on the stage. Even to the point of actors playing different minor characters from performance to performance.”
Keeping to what drew the company to the source material, Simpson said, “We didn’t Hollywood up Lauren Slater’s journey to redemption. Putting her in the experiments is a way to put ourselves in the experiments. Other than that, we kept it spartan. The difficulty is to trust the material, to trust simplicity.”
“In [our more] visual pieces, you pare away the words and the eloquence is visual. You know that thing in bad Shakespeare where a genital joke is accompanied by touching their genitals? Very annoying. That comes from a fear the audience won’t get it. The more you trust, the more the audience will step up. That’s at the heart of all our work. Our job is to create a space for the audience to dream into. For that, you create a space. We’re not making a movie; we’re making a piece of theatre.”
We ended our conversation – knowing we were on the cusp of Simpson’s co-director Phelim McDermott opening a wildly successful new production of Cosi Fan Tutte at the Met – talking a little about what the Wexner Center means to a company like Improbable.
“It’s very unusual, mostly our relationship with [departing curator] Chuck Helm. We found kindred spirits in each other. The Wexner Center is so generous in a very easy way. The team is terrific, and there’s trust there. They understand work like ours has periods where it looks like absolutely nothing. At a work in progress showing after a research and development residency, people said ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ We’re creating a foundation. They get that. They get the process.”
“We’ve made so many shows with their help. Much of the work in operas is developed with the help of the Wexner Center. New York owes Columbus, Ohio, a big thank you. That kind of work can’t exist without the work at places like the Wexner Center. You can develop your trust in that simplicity. Not many people get the connection between small-scale improvisational work and our big, splashy shows, but they’re both based on people responding to each other. It’s a living thing.”
Opening Skinner’s Box runs March 29-April 1 with performances at 8:00 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit wexarts.org.