“Mike and I ran that one car fire last year. You remember that one?”
The bay feels cavernous and strange when emptied of its fleet of ambulances. Only one of them remains, parked at an angle in front of about 50 people — mostly EMTs and other first responders — sitting in three rows of folding chairs watching a play. This vehicle too might have to leave.
Elliot, the rookie EMT, takes a sip of beer at the bar counter. After she and her partner, Mike, get done responding to the call, Mike asks if she wants something to eat. “I think, sure, distraction is good, this’ll get my mind off burnt up bodies and shit,” she tells her friends. “And he says, ‘I’m in the mood for barbecue.’”
“If you don’t know the solution to a problem, make theater about it.”
An ambulance bay on the outskirts of Brattleboro, a Vermont town of just over 12,000, might not seem like an ideal location for a theater production. For Taiga Christie, lead writer and co-director of Counting Pebbles, “It would take a lot, I think, to convince me to perform it in a theater again.”
The play centers around the grief of four EMTs trying to make sense of their friend and co-worker Mike’s death of an overdose. Through funeral orations, flashbacks, and this wake at their favorite bar, they attempt to come to terms with the loss and process their own on-the-job trauma.
The idea for Counting Pebbles came to Christie in 2011 while working as an EMT-in-training in a Vermont town even smaller than Brattleboro. “We’re responding to our friends and our family and our neighbors’ kids,” she remembers coworkers telling her. “We know most of the people on these calls, and we don’t have any kind of support.” Not only were mental health services virtually unavailable, even talking about it felt taboo. “People would talk to me because I was the 24-year-old girl from out of town, but it was always in an office with the door closed,” Christie said. “My background is in community-based theater. And I started thinking: Is there a way to talk about this through theater?”
Unlike hospitals and fire stations, EMS services tend to be private, for-profit, and nonunion. “That company has every incentive to minimize the supports it has to pay for,” Christie said. “[People] assume that anyone working on an ambulance is on an equal plane in terms of pay, in terms of benefits, to a firefighter or a police officer. And that’s usually not the case.”
A 2022 study found that 30 percent of EMTs have some form of PTSD. EMTs contemplate suicide 10 times more than the general population, and are more than twice as likely to die by their own hand. These struggles can lead to burnout and compassion fatigue, which in turn worsen patient outcomes. First responder studies suggest higher rates of substance abuse as well.
In 2014, Christie co-founded Faultline Ensemble, a collective of writers, directors, performers, and editors, to co-develop a script and experiment with performance. The ensemble also drew from interviews from mental health advocacy group Code Green and long interviews that Christie conducted while studying in Yale’s public health graduate program in 2017.
In March of 2019, Faultline Ensemble performed Counting Pebbles for the first time. The reaction was visceral. “It highlighted a huge area that I’ve never given thought to,” one audience member told Faultline. “I sat in the theater crying.” Counting Pebbles is intended for a rural audience, which means it needs to speak to people across the political spectrum and not just people who align with Faultline’s queer and leftist crew. “The goal was, can we find ways to weave our values around care provision and trauma-informed care and harm reduction into this play without it being a lecture?” The authors carefully avoided language associated with social justice causes and instead had the characters speak the way their audience does — coarse jokes and dark humor included. “We tried to build connection with the characters first, and then have the characters express opinions that might be a little bit fringe,” Christie said. These ideas include capitalist exploitation, compassion for addicts, and the abysmal state of the United States health care system — which the characters proceed to debate.
“I’d say this play sits in a lineage somewhere between community-based performance, documentary theater, and Theater of the Oppressed,” Christie told me. Brazilian left-wing activist and drama theorist Augusto Boal initially developed Theater of the Oppressed in the 1970s as a way to actively engage working-class and rural audiences in analysis of community issues, sometimes through audience participation, sometimes through discussion. Faultline Ensemble encourages audience members to stay and talk, then join a feedback session.
On the night I attended, the directors asked the audience to talk about what resonated, what could be improved, and what kinds of programs or actions would best support EMTs. Everyone who spoke seemed deeply moved. A few said the play needs a wider audience — something Faultline hears a lot. “We’ve been told: Show this to our families and community members who don’t understand what we do,” she said. “Show this to politicians and to local officials and to HR departments.”
For now, Frontline’s focus remains on reaching EMTs. Several ambulance services have requested performances, some as far away as Oregon. As its geographical reach expands, group members hope their audiences can too. “Augusto Boal says that if you don’t know the solution to a problem, make theater about it,” the written program states. “Use storytelling to start the conversation. We hope you’ll join us.”
Laura Jedeed is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Politico, Rolling Stone, and the New Republic.
Photos courtesy of Counting Pebbles. Treatment by Jordi Ng.
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