THE PATIENT GLORIA by Gina Moxley at The Everyman

California 1964.

A nine-year-old girl, Pammy, asks, “Mommy, did you ever go to bed with anyone besides Daddy?” The child’s mother, Gloria, recently divorced and uncomfortable with her sexual desire, lies “No, honey.”

Gloria later wrote in her diary “What was I supposed to say? Of course dear, everyone does? Oh shit.”

This exchange became central to the 1965 films Three Approaches to Psychotherapy or The Gloria Films. The project was the idea of psychotherapist Dr Everett Shostrum, who directed and produced, enlisting three eminent psychotherapists to work with a thirty-year-old, chain-smoking, loquacious divorcee named Gloria. His avowed intention was to show the films to college psychology students to give them an insight into what is usually a private process, but he subsequently released the films in cinemas and on TV, betraying the privacy of the patient Gloria.

A punky mash-up of re-enactment, actual footage and lived experience, The Patient Gloria is a gloriously ballsy meditation on therapy, misogyny and female desire. And it grabs psychotherapy where it really hurts.

WINNER – 2019 Scotsman Fringe First Award

WINNER – 2019 Herald Angel Award

“Rebellious… playful… deliciously arch grade of satire” – The New York Times (Critic’s Pick)
“Bold, brilliant, and highly original” – The Scotsman
“Male psychotherapists feel the heat…waywardly funny” – The Guardian
“Gloria is intensely intelligent and guilelessly sexual.” – The New Yorker
“Moxley has turned pain into a party. By the end, you might be dancing along.” – The New Yorker
“An indelible stage picture I won’t forget soon.” – The New Yorker