My first attempt to generate something like a stage play was at the beginning of this century. I was creating trainings about infants and toddlers in foster care for child welfare caseworkers and foster parents. As a child psychologist running a grant-funded program evaluating children new into foster care, I could recite facts and figures and show graphs on PowerPoint slides. Yet in these trainings about very young foster children, I felt something was missing— the subjective reality of these young children.

I still remembered the confusion and tears of my niece and nephew, two and three years old at the time, coming to live with my family when I was a teenager. How could I communicate the impact on children under four years old who had experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of birth parents they desperately wanted to trust and then the sudden jarring move to a new home and new parent figures, sometimes more than once? I started writing and acting out monologues as if these preverbal children’s thoughts could be translated into adult speech. These monologues quickly became the most popular, and in my mind, most useful part of the trainings. Child welfare professionals, with decades of experience, came up to me in tears thanking me for helping them understand the pain of these young children.

Yet these monologues broke the rules of reality: infants and toddlers may speak or sign individual words to two-word combinations but they do not express complex feelings, expectations of the future, or confused ambivalence about caregivers. Yet my audiences of foster care professionals understood, partly because of their experiences with stage plays and movies, that I was altering reality to communicate a “truth.” I also made sure to label my soliloquies as “monologues” invoking the stage play association explicitly. I wondered some if the monologues would work but the effectiveness from the very first training convinced me that my worry was misplaced. Heightened language and reality are part of all artistic narratives— part of communicating internal experiences of humans to each other.

Politics has not tended to focus on our internal experiences. As a middle-aged (not yet elderly) man, I have been the audience for many political campaigns. I have become inured to the altered language and reality of political speech— campaign promises the candidate would have no power to keep even if elected, answers to debate questions that pivot away from the question as soon as possible, condemning other candidates in your own party until the primary election is held and then lauding their abilities to help them gain office in the general election. I figured it was my job as a voter to make my way through this jungle of discourse, often with a machete, to arrive at some sense of who each candidate was and make my decision of who to vote for. I found this work necessary but exhausting and frustrating. Why could they not communicate more straightforwardly?

Politicians’ carefully misdirecting speech reminds me of Act I of one of my favorite plays, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods— a mash-up of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel. It always transports me, from the first time I saw it in a Mount Hood Community College production, to a presentation at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to a video of the Broadway production with Bernadette Peters. The fairy tale characters vigorously pursue and achieve their own goals regardless of the impact on others. Jack kills the giant without regard for the grief it will cause the giant’s wife. The Prince frees Rapunzel from her tower, but what about the impact on Rapunzel’s mother, who suddenly suffers the loss of her child? Fairy tales have “good guys” and “bad guys,” us versus them, not a lot of nuance. Fairy tales are another kind of tweaking of reality, a simplification to convey a moral or lesson.

Sondheim uses Act II to confront his characters. A common refrain is “actions have consequences.” The giant’s wife goes on a grief-stricken rampage, seeking revenge on the murderer of her beloved husband. Rapunzel’s mother keens over the loss of her daughter and her own controlling behavior that alienated her only child. In Act II, there are no longer “good guys” and “bad guys” but rather complex characters with complicated motivations.

Into the Woods epitomizes the heightening of thought and language that stage plays can provide in which we consider the complex mixture of motivations, impulses, and emotions that make up the human experience. They remind us that others are not all bad or good or the summation of their political stances. Yet stage plays are also altered reality— compressing and sharpening conflicts and dilemmas to also deliver a deeper kind of truth to audiences.

As we move into the next election campaign, I think about us trying to figure out how this new political environment works like toddlers in a new foster home. Why does this mom smell different? Where’s my favorite bunny? There’s nobody here that scares me, but is anybody a safe hugger? We are moving into a strange political landscape with few guideposts. Will we think like the characters from Act I of Into the Woods— self-centered, short-sighted and goal-driven, or more like the characters in Act II— reflective, considering the long-range impacts, sensitive to others, appreciating consequences? Both are a way of being and acting in the world, each with its own view of reality. I pray that as the drama acts out on the political stage we will heed the lessons from Into the Woods in this strange new political foster home we are living in. For the sake of children, whether in foster care or separated from their parents at the border or despairing that adults will do anything to give them a livable planet or just looking to adults for a model of how to act as good citizens when strong emotions are flying around. In the words of Into the Woods song “Children Will Listen:”

Children will look to you

For which way to turn,

To learn what to be.

Careful before you say

“Listen to me,”

Children will listen.