Fire in the Heart demonstrates healing power of the arts
Deborah AllenDeborah Allen, theater artist, director, producer, writer, actor, counselor and screenwriter, has come a long way from the confused 15-year-old girl who was raped, then later molested by the minister who was supposed to help her.She attributes her healing to theater and the arts in general.“It’s always helped me heal because it’s always been a place where I’ve been in a community of like-minded souls, so it’s been a safe place since I was a kid,” she said.Allen, now 65, said she reached a point where she needed to confront the violence that had happened to her as a teenager in a way that it wouldn’t hurt her again. So she wrote a screenplay about a teenager who was raped.“In trying to metabolize that pain through me as an older woman, I created this character and that was helpful, and then I wanted to present that process at the California Women’s Conference so I invited other artists who had also been through serious trauma to come and share their art forms and that became Fire in the Heart.”Fire in the Heart, a national touring company, includes 20 performers speaking in the art forms that saved their lives and also features local artists. They will perform for the third time at The White Theatre for two performances: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6, and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 7.The two-hour production includes gospel, hip hop, classical music, dance, poetry, film, theater and autobiography.Allen’s journey toward healing began with The Healers’ Forum, which she and her husband Dan Buffo have been in for more than 25 years as energy healers and counselors.The idea for Fire in the Heart eventually grew out of “me moving from theater into healing work because I needed to raise a family, but I needed to do the work to get more well myself,” Allen explained. “I went into healing work because it was time and so (Fire in the Heart) definitely grew out of my work of understanding trauma better, which came through The Healers’ Forum.”Her brother, Dr. Ace Allen, former president of the Jewish Community Center and of Congregation Ohev Sholom, said he, his sister and their other three siblings were very close growing up.He said his sister told him when he was in his late teens or early 20s that she had experienced “unwanted advances” when she was 15.“I don’t think she really knew how to frame it,” he said. “I didn’t use the word ‘rape’ until she did many years later. I think it took her a long time to reckon with this.”Dr. Allen said his sister has always been outgoing and very social, but since Fire in the Heart he does see a change in her.“She kind of tended to put people over herself, like maybe their feelings were more important than her own,” he said. “She’s learned to respect her own feelings and her own boundaries a little bit better.“It’s just been a kind of lifetime process. I know that she was flailing for a long time. She started getting interested in healing work pretty late in the game.”Deborah Allen believes the arts are critical in the path toward healing “because they create a link to something that’s deeper, wider and more universal,” she said. “(The arts) leave me less alone and also engage the creative process, which is life affirming, and trauma can really put you in a loop that feels like you can’t move forward.”One of the intentions of Fire in the Heart is to help develop inner resilience in times of chaotic change and overload and Allen said Jews as a people know a lot about resilience.“The spirit of Judaism is really in the show, as is the spirit of the African American community, the Latino community and the Indian community and, of course, the white community and the Christian community,” she said. “There are so many threads of ways of creating resilience and I just think that Jewish people have something to say about that.”In Fire in the Heart there are numerous ways in which the audience feels the healing Allen said.“For us the audience gets way more than we do, or an equal amount; it’s so exuberant. We have fabulous music, which really helps, and we have first-rate monologue — they don’t leave you sunk in the story, they pull you all the way through,” she said.“That’s your assignment if you’re an artist in our show — you can’t just leave people in trauma, you have to show them how you pull it through. And it’s designed so that there’s music and uplift and celebration.”The whole audience just automatically gets up and dances; people of all colors and all ages. You feel that “we are the world, we are everybody,” and that creates a sense of, “Oh, this is what it would look like if we were all in this together,” she said. Everyone is united in healing through music, dance and theater.Dr. Allen said Fire in the Heart is about people truly being able to reckon with really bad things that have happened in their life.Deborah Allen said she also feels 100 percent that just listening to a song or watching a movie or play can be a healing experience. She still can feel the pattern of old ways of coping, but is aware of them now and that’s when the arts come to the rescue.In fact, it was the song “Sisters of Mercy” by Leonard Cohen that she said helped save her life. In the show she speaks about how singing that song out loud in the aftermath of trauma gave her a thread to hold onto.“The words and the music reached in and helped me right myself,” she said. “You don’t have to be an artist to be healed by art.”Advance tickets for Fire in the Heart are $18 to $40 and are now on sale online at TheWhiteTheatre.org or at The White Theatre Box Office, 5801 W. 115th Street, Overland Park, 913-327-8054.
