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Speak, Memory

For performer and playwright Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, theatre offers a way to heal  For performer and playwright Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, theatre offers a way to heal In April, in an Off-Off-Broadway theater near Times Square, in front of a live audience, Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, relived the worst moment of […]

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For performer and playwright Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, theatre offers a way to heal
 

For performer and playwright Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, theatre offers a way to heal

In April, in an Off-Off-Broadway theater near Times Square, in front of a live audience, Megan Auster-Rosen ’02, BA ’03, relived the worst moment of her life. For eleven performances on the tiny stage, she went back to her sophomore spring, when she’d taken a semester off from Cornell to live in Ghana. The theatre major had been hearing about the wonders of West Africa her whole life; her father, psychiatrist Ken Rosen, had served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the early Seventies. She’d gone to Ghana in search of a similarly life-altering experience.

Her wish came true—but in tragic fashion. Rosen had come to visit his daughter, taking his first trip to Africa in three decades. Traveling back from a game park in a thunderstorm, their plane smashed onto the runway with the landing gear partly extended, cracking the aircraft in half at their row. Auster-Rosen found herself underneath the plane, gravely injured; her father was dead.

Auster-Rosen

“I was paralyzed in my left leg. I had third-degree burns. I broke a ton of bones—ribs, my clavicle, my nose. I wasn’t able to use my right hand,” recalls Auster-Rosen, who returned to the Hill the following fall, getting around campus in a handicap-accessible bus. “They weren’t sure if I was going to be able to walk again. Just getting back my faculties was a huge part of my recovery. I had to go in for knee surgery. A lot of my cuts got infected, and there were pieces of gravel that would come to the top of my skin and need to be drained. We found a full piece of green grass several months later, perfectly preserved.”

Auster-Rosen has channeled that horrific experience into From the Same Cloth, a two-person play that debuted to sellout crowds at the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival. This spring, the show—with Auster-Rosen playing herself and an Equity actor as her father—had a limited run at New York’s Fault Line Theatre.

From the Same Cloth melds Ken Rosen’s unpublished memoir of his days in Sierra Leone with Auster-Rosen’s original work; she plays not only herself but others she met in Ghana, from her trio of flighty British roommates to a fortuneteller who eerily predicted the fateful plane trip. “The triumphant and exciting thing about this play was that I got an extra month with my dad,” Auster-Rosen says. “After he died, I thought I wouldn’t see him again. But then I got to spend this time with him and his words, and with an actor who looks kind of like him, interacting in a way that was honoring him.”

At Cornell, Auster-Rosen melded her theatre studies with work in psychology and anthropology; she went on to earn a master’s in performance studies from NYU. Now she’s working on a doctorate in clinical psychology at Yeshiva University, studying the potential role of theatre in treating trauma victims. “I found that therapy wasn’t that helpful for me,” she observes. “But standing in front of a group of people, telling my story, and having them connect in some way—for some reason, that was.”

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