About the School

SON Home | UW Home | MyUW | UW Bothell | UW Tacoma | HealthLinks | Contact the School | Search SON | Internal

Nursing Makes a House Call at Seattle's Intiman Theater
FROM: Kathleen Dannenhold
206-221-2456
kathyd@u.washington.edu
DATE: Aug. 28, 2001

When an actor needs help with his role, he typically finds an outside expert who can provide insights into his character. But understanding how different family members react to the death of a child can be a very complex matter requiring both expert knowledge and direct world experience. Realizing this, the cast from a production of "The Lady from the Sea" at Seattle's Intiman Theater decided to call upon the University of Washington for help. And help came in the form of Professor Emeritus Shirley Murphy from the top-ranked School of Nursing, an expert on helping parents cope with the overwhelming consequences of losing a child.

"I was very impressed with the questions the cast members asked, and their remarkable insights into the experience," Murphy explained. "This was particularly remarkable because some members of the cast were quite young and none of them had yet experienced the death of a loved one in their own lives."

"The Lady from the Sea" centers on a young woman's response to the death of her infant son three years prior and the effect of this response on people around her, especially her husband. Bartlett Sher, artistic director of the Intiman, describes the play as the "struggles of a couple to find each other set against the enormous symbolic landscape of the sea." Like the play's author, Henrik Ibsen, who was remarkable in his time for putting women at the center of his plays, the cast of "The Lady from the Sea" turned to Murphy to help them center on the play's dynamics.

Murphy met with the cast and director to answer questions and to share what she has learned about loss, its effect on the roles of other children in the family, and the gender differences between the ways that men and women are treated who have lost a child, another of Murphy's research interests.

"Men are expected to 'get on with life' more than women," she explains. "The cast was very interested in this difference, and asked very astute questions."

"Getting along" after the death of a child is something Murphy knows a lot about. Since 1991, Murphy has worked with nearly 200 parents of children who met violent death as part of several long-term studies funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research and others.

"You don't ever recover from the death of a child," Murphy explains. "You just learn to adjust. As a nurse, I was interested in understanding why some people seemed to cope better than others."

Thanks to Murphy's willingness to serve as a volunteer consultant, members of the Intiman cast now understand as well, at least in terms of their characters' roles.

Murphy says she very much enjoyed the experience, and was delighted by the opportunity to share the benefits of her nursing research with the local community.

Dr. Tom Robertson, a pulmonary specialist from UWMC, and Dr. Sharon Romm, a psychiatrist from Harborview, were also involved in different consultation sessions with the cast.

"The Lady from the Sea" runs through September 22.

Murphy can be reached at 206/543-8569 or by email at samurphy@u.washington.edu. Her research studies on bereaved parents in the aftermath of violence can be found on the web at http://www.son.washington.edu/research/research-review.asp - Click on "Children, Adolescent & Family Health."

Return to News and Events