I did meet with people that were experts, doctors, psychiatrists that dealt with psychopaths and people who had committed horrendous crimes, and then I spent some time with those people themselves, people who have been institutionalized for great periods of time.
For assistance, she seeks out a brilliant scientist who has the disadvantage of having been institutionalized for the previous two decades.
But first we meet the play's only other character, Carla (Ruth Reid), who has the look of someone who has been institutionalized for a very long time.
Doris Mount, who has been institutionalized for 30 years, proudly told relatives during a family reunion last week that she had voted by absentee ballot.
There's the gray-blue "Duluth," set after Bamford moved back in with her Midwestern parents, having been institutionalized for suicidal depression.
He said he was concerned about the care being received by the former patients, many of whom had been institutionalized for years or even decades in New York psychiatric wards.
There are some pretty-boys-at-the-gym scenes, in a subplot involving a son who's moved to Los Angeles (the weakest part of the show), but the primary gay character — Brother Boy, a cross-dressing Tammy Wynette impersonator who's been institutionalized for 28 years because his parents wanted him "de-homosexualized" — is old and fleshy and tired.
His mother had been institutionalized for mental illness for nearly a year after his birth, and he was described at his murder trial as having suffered severe abuse from his mother, who burned him in scalding bath water and forced him to drink his urine and eat his feces.
This film also turns on a terminally alone character, Roman Kogler (the touching newcomer Thomas Schubert), a 19-year-old inmate at a juvenile detention center and throwaway child who has been institutionalized for years for a crime revealed late in the story.
