Baltimore Bound

RWTG will travel to Baltimore, Maryland in November to reprise Off the Map, a play by Joan Ackerman, for the 55th Annual Institute and Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists.

RWTG is a troupe of American group therapists that presents stage plays to illuminate the complexity of relationships and the universal need for mutual recognition and community wellbeing for audiences of psychotherapists around the world.

Following the performance, an exploration of the play’s themes and their relevance to the conference theme, Generativity: Energizing the Life of the Therapist, will be conducted.

As with group therapy, Off the Map is about discovery, growth and healing entwined. Protagonist Bo Groden looks back on the summer when she was eleven years old and everything changed. Serving as the play’s narrator, she sifts through the memories of an unusual childhood spent in the wilds of Northern New Mexico where her enterprising parents forged a modest life off the land and the local dump. She courageously recalls the difficult summer when her father Charlie spiraled into depression. Young Bo’s prayers for a miracle to be delivered from a mother who gardens in the nude and a father who cannot stop weeping are finally answered when young William Gibbs, a rookie IRS tax collector, arrives with a fever, an audit and a long-held secret. Healing forces are mysteriously set in motion, and dreams that once seemed impossible even to contemplate, find exuberant and transformative expression.