'Wonderland' Therapeutic For Indy-Minded Actor
Donovan offers alternative to mass entertainment
By DONNA PETROZZELLO
Tuesday, March 28, 2000

Martin Donovan hates clichés.

When he agreed to take on the role of Neil Harrison, a doctor in a Manhattan psychiatric hospital in "Wonderland," he insisted that Harrison lead both an alternative professional and personal life.

While Harrison's work at Rivervue psychiatric hospital was different enough to hold his attention, Donovan said he also "fought and won" to make Harrison a fan of alternative singer PJ Harvey.

"We'll use her music at the end of the eighth episode and throughout the rest of the series," said Donovan.

Donovan's already a Harvey fan. In his most recent collaboration with independent film maker Hal Hartley, he played Jesus Christ to Harvey's Mary Magdalene in a 1998 featurette, "The Book of Life."

Starring in the ensemble cast of the gritty ABC drama marks Donovan's first prime-time TV series.

He's best known for starring in "The Opposite of Sex" as schoolteacher Bill Truitt. This fall, Donovan will play the philandering Tom Buchanan to Mira Sorvino's Daisy in an A&E production of "The Great Gatsby."

The subtle, in-control actor says it has never been his nature to play a role that's meant to "appeal to a mass audience," but "Wonderland" is offbeat enough to suit his taste.

"There's no way to go out and try to pursue a mass audience," said Donovan. "I don't know how to do it, and I'm not interested in it."

He is interested, though, in portraying a profession that he knew little about before studying for the role.

Donovan spent time with real-life Bellevue Hospital doctors. He watched them work with criminally insane patients, seeing how the doctors kept their cool in tense situations and how the patients behaved.

After walking into their world, Donovan recalls, "I realized I didn't know anything about it, and probably most people don't. I don't think on TV we've ever seen the inside of a criminal psychiatrist's office in a hospital.

"There are areas of medicine and the law that come together that people know very little about," said Donovan.

"These doctors have to deal with medical issues, legal issues and high-profile patients locked up for committing major crimes. It's fascinating."

Not that he's simply going to mimic the real-life doctors. That's a lesson he learned at 19 when he played Oscar Madison in a college production of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" and "just imitated Walter Matthau's performance" from the film."

"I was naive, I was 19, and I hadn't yet figured out that I shouldn't be imitating someone else," he said.

Later that year, Donovan met Matthau and blurted out that he'd tried to lift his rendition of Madison, move for move.

"He told me that I should be playing roles my way and shook my hand, but he was very nice about it," Donovan said.

Peter Berg really gets into his work, and frankly, that's a bit frightening.

To get the details right for "Wonderland," his psychiatric hospital-set ABC drama, Berg, known to many as the spirited Dr. Billy Kronk on "Chicago Hope" (CBS) and the director of the film "Very Bad Things," went deep inside Gotham's Bellevue Hospital.

"I basically lived at Bellevue for six months straight — not as a patient, as an observer," Berg said, showing a guest his official identification card. "The hospital provided me with a tremendous amount of access."

As part of the access, Berg had to agree not to disclose the identities of real-life patients or the staff at the hospital.

But what he got in return was in-depth information that, in one way or another, worked its way into the New York-shot series, which launches Thursday at 10 p.m.

He spent most of his time in the forensics unit — an in-house prison of sorts — and the emergency room. What he saw, he said, was much different than the images of psychiatric wards presented in films like "The Snake Pit" or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

"Bellevue was a much more inspiring, heroic, healing place than I had ever imagined," Berg said. "And it was a place where so many of the issues of society collide.

"It's a place where people come when their minds no longer work. Their minds become sick and they need help — and the reasons our minds become sick are as varied as we are."

ABC picked up eight episodes of "Wonderland," which stars Ted Levine ("Silence of the Lambs), Martin Donovan ("The Opposite of Sex"), Michelle Forbes ("Homicide: Life on the Street"), Billy Burke ("Without Limits"), Joelle Carter ("High Fidelity") and Michael Jai White ("Mutiny").

Berg said he's been fascinated with issues of the mind since he was a kid growing up in Chappaqua. His mother worked at a local hospital and he became intrigued with the workings of his own mind, while dabbling in psychedelic drugs at boarding school.

"I can remember being in high school and taking psychedelic mushrooms and LSD and being amazed at areas of my mind I quite simply wasn't able to access without these drugs."

But translating issues of the mind to the small screen isn't easy. Unlike, say, "ER," or Berg's former place of fictional employment, where a medical case can be solved in the course of an episode, mental problems take time.

Additionally, there's a built-in stigma with mental problems — especially those requiring stays at a psychiatric hospital — that might turn some viewers off. For example, in the first episode, a patient jams a needle into the belly of a pregnant doctor.

Adding to the darkness of the series is the documentary style of production, which adds more edge.

"The fear about doing a show about a psychiatric hospital is that you're going to present something that is unrelentingly grim for an audience and people are immediately going to turn off the television or change the channel to something more comfortable," he said. "So for us, the challenge was convincing the network and the studio that we could find a way to make the experience of spending an hour in a psychiatric hospital something that felt satisfying and, in a way, enjoyable."

Finding the series at all may be more of a problem for viewers, though.

ABC has scheduled it to air against "ER," in a time period littered with the cancellation notices of well-intentioned shows that have failed against the NBC drama.

On the other hand, "Wonderland" has the benefit of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" as a lead-in. "Wonderland" replaces "20/20 Downtown."

"I'm glad I have a time slot," he said, adding that he was happy to have gotten the chance to produce eight shows.

"If I had my choice, I wouldn't want to go up against 'ER,' but nobody asked me. I didn't have a choice.

"My only hope is that we can establish some heartbeat as a show and quickly be moved to another time slot. I have no desire to take on the monster which is 'ER.' I have no illusions that we can co-exist peacefully with that giant right now."

The opening scene of "Wonderland," the intense new ABC drama series premiering tomorrow night at 10, starts off by throwing you right down the rabbit hole and into a world of chaos.

The first taste we get of this excellent new series — the first episode was created, written and directed by former "Chicago Hope" star Peter Berg — is a cacophonous psych-ward session where all the patients are babbling and gesturing simultaneously.

With all the noise and confusion, it's hard to distinguish the characters who need help from the ones who are giving it — and if there's any central theme to "Wonderland," it's that the dividing line between those two poles is often treacherously thin and elusive.

True to the form staked out by the landmark hospital series "St. Elsewhere," and carried on currently by "Chicago Hope" and NBC's massively popular "ER," the medical personnel in "Wonderland" are far from perfect, and burdened with personal problems that often become major factors in their lives.

In "Wonderland," the psychiatric workers at a public New York hospital (think Bellevue, though this is called Rivervue) are burdened indeed.

Robert Banger, the chief of forensic psychiatry (played with edgy aggressiveness by Ted Levine), is on the other end of the evaluations for once, being assessed by other experts to determine his fitness to retain custody of his two young kids. His ex-wife is played by Patricia Clarkson, who played Daniel Benzali's wife on "Murder One."

Abe Matthews (Billy Burke) is a womanizing hotshot with a gift for relating to patients but not to his explosive girlfriend. Neil Harrison (Martin Donovan) and his wife, Lyla Garrity, (Michelle Forbes) both hold important posts at Rivervue, and she's nearing her third trimester of pregnancy.

Two other psych specialists, played by Michael Jai White and Joelle Carter, are less defined in the two episodes available for preview — but given time, and given this show's fertile soil, should blossom nicely.

"Wonderland," like NBC's "The West Wing," is a TV viewing experience that both demands and rewards attention. It's loaded with dialogue, and with intense characters, all of which you'd expect from a show set in a psych ward. But it also has a sense of drama, and action, that makes the most of the characters being introduced.

Forbes, who was so unfailingly believable and bewitching on "Homicide: Life on the Street," is just as good here. She and Levine, in the first two episodes, are the pace cars that relentlessly drive this show. In the first two hours, the guest stars playing psych patients — including Leland Orser as a cop killer and Jay O. Sanders as a suicidal banker — add tremendously to the mix, and to the overall sense of urgency and chaos.

Berg, who does not appear on camera, is enough of an actor's writer, and actor's director, to give his cast room to breathe and work. We get to know them as people, often by little bits of business captured not by dialogue, but by a glance or a telling camera shot. And then, once we know them, all hell breaks loose.

There's one scene in tomorrow's pilot, which I won't detail at all so that its surprise impact will remain intact, that literally made me gasp in shock. "Wonderland," in the truest sense, is Must-See TV. For ABC to schedule it smack against NBC's reigning Must-See medical drama is either aggressive faith of the highest order or an unfortunate and undeserved death wish.

If ABC doesn't find a way to save and nurture "Wonderland," though, the executives responsible should have their heads examined.

A mental-health watchdog group yesterday lashed out at ABC's new psychiatric hospital-set drama, "Wonderland," calling the show a "potentially dangerous threat" to those suffering from mental illnesses.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a grassroots organization dedicated to improving life for mental-illness victims, says that the drama may increase the risk of suicides.

"Wonderland" is an hour-long show conceived by Peter Berg ("Chicago Hope") that is set in a Bellevue Hospital-like psychiatric facility. To research the story lines and setting, Berg spent six months making the rounds with doctors at Bellevue. He has used some of them as consultants on the show.

But after seeing two episodes of the series, the executives at NAMI say they are concerned that "Wonderland," which debuts tomorrow at 10 p.m., will perpetuate the stereotype that mental-illness patients are "killers, crazies and freaks."

"We get a lot of messages in the show that treatment doesn't work or is ineffective. We get a very grim, very dark picture of mental illness," said NAMI executive director Laurie Flynn. "And while this is a slice, unfortunately it reinforces every negative stereotype of mental illness."

Flynn asserts that the show "stigmatizes" mental-illness patients and presents an image that "they're violent, you can't get near them, that they're pathetic, hopeless and can't get well."

Berg said the group misreads his intentions.

"The patients we present are individuals who have emotional problems who are handled by extremely dedicated doctors in an empathetic, caring, optimistic, professional way," Berg said. "It is our intention ... to provide a catalyst for honest dialogue about the often misunderstood and inaccurately represented world of the mentally ill."

"Still, in the first episode, a mental patient who stops taking his medicine stabs a pregnant woman with a needle. The man, who killed people in Times Square, later commits suicide after being treated.

"For him, the system failed." Berg said. "With this character, we are trying to highlight the importance of continuity of care and the tragedies of that failure. ABC picked up eight episodes of the drama, which it will air Thursdays against NBC's "ER" and CBS' "48 Hours."

Flynn said people suffering from mental illness would likely be more interested in the show than the average viewer, and thus would be hit with a negative portrayal that could lead to more suicides and to fewer people getting help.

"It's really not about our lives," she said. "It's about this very extreme slice of life that isn't typical.

"They're all wired and freakish," she added. "It would be like having a show about African- Americans in this country today and it all takes place in a ghetto welfare office."

Earlier this week, Flynn sent letters to ABC and Berg, asking that the show be toned down, especially the violence.

She wants ABC to air the show with warnings, to promote suicide hotlines, and to add warnings to offset negative content.

"We're hoping we'll have some response from them," she said. "We'd like to work with them to get a less-than-sensationalized program. We would like to see it be a little more reflective."

By going public with its concerns, the group is bringing more attention to the show, a fact not lost on Flynn.

"We just felt we couldn't be silent and have this picture presented," she said. "We had to say, this is not right. This is not our lives."
 

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