The beginning can be traced to the tears of Amaana Thompson. It was June, and Thompson, who had taken the bus from Inglewood, arrived early one morning for treatment at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey.
Linda Muccitelli saw her crying in the lobby and tried to comfort her, but Thompson, 63, said she felt buried beneath a painful past and an uncertain future. Muccitelli, an occupational therapist at the center, listened, then suggested Thompson write about her feelings.
"Who am I?" she wrote. "Where am I and when?" It was a poem about searching for one's place in the world, and finding it in a memory. Muccitelli, 37, understood. She, too, had felt adrift at times in her life. She read Thompson's poem and hung it on her office wall.
The poem sparked a connection between the two women that grew until it turned into a remarkable evening of theater, transforming not just for Thompson, but for dozens of others whose lives have been shattered by bullets, by car crashes, by illness.
Thompson had come to the center for help after injuring her shoulder in a fall, the latest trauma in a series that included brain surgery and stroke. And Muccitelli was in her 12th year of helping people rebuild physically and emotionally when she was assigned to be Thompson's occupational therapist. As the women talked, they discovered a shared passion for theater--Muccitelli is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena; Thompson had acted in 36 productions of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles.
The words, as they sometimes do with Muccitelli, tumbled innocently out of her mouth: "We should put on a show," she said, and then she smiled.
Words kept tumbling. She started talking about how she could gather some of her patients, set up a few folding chairs in the courtyard and do a little show. She mentioned it to her acting teacher, Loree Lynn, founder of DreaMakers Center for the Aspiring Artist in Manhattan Beach. Lynn, diagnosed with polio at age 10, said she once conducted a performing arts program at a rehabilitation facility in Chicago. She offered to help coach performers.
Word went out, and half a dozen people showed up for the first meeting. Rehearsals began in September, and each week the cast seemed to grow, as did Muccitelli's vision. She saw the show as the first step toward a permanent performing arts program at Rancho. Maybe they could take their show on the road? Or have their own theater, or develop a television show set in a rehab center?
