Happiness Gym in Boca Beach: Good News
Professor Ken Wietzman’s “The Theatre of Well-Being” engages with the formation of the Positive Psychology movement to transform decades of research into an experimental, participatory, theatrical event called the Happiness Gym. Its main goal is to foster connection, gratitude, and kindness based on scientific research that promotes and maintains happiness and well-being. After winning the HISB Fellowship award in 2023, Professor Weitzman created a trial run of his event with Stony Brook students, and later had its first professional production in Florida called “Happiness Gym in Boca Beach.”
Professor Weitzman’s journey to create the Happiness Gym started when he began researching positive psychology and encountered many practices with scientific backing that promote happiness. After attempting to follow them, however, Professor Weitzman encountered a roadblock with these exercises as they started to feel like a burdening to-do list. Upon further research and hypothesizing, Professor Weitzman read that having a prosocial, communal exercise where you practice twice a week, will effectively promote and maintain lasting happiness. This led to his belief that a theatrical event that featured these prosocial aspects would be efficacious. As a result, the Happiness Gym was founded.
Piloted as part of a Stony Brook class in Spring ‘22, the Gym took over three Staller theatres that each had a distinct theme: Good News, Gratitude, and Connection. The first room, the Good News room, involved participants reading a kind story from a piece of paper, and retelling it to other students. This fostered an easy and fear-less social connection because participants would tell stories not about themselves but other people. The Gratitude room contained different stations that all had a unique prompt that participants would answer (e.g. What are three qualities you possess for which you’re grateful?). Students would additionally write a letter
Happiness Gym in Boca Beach: Connection
to someone expressing gratitude. Scientific research states that reading the letter out loud to the recipient would produce the most effective results, but Professor Weitzman set up a more theatrical way to present the letter ‘as if’ to the person (i.e., to an empty chair, to one of the facilitators, in a phone booth, etc.). Finally, the Connection room had pairs of students go back and forth asking and answering thirty questions that got progressively deeper. By the time the exercises were over, Professor Weitzman found that the students didn’t want to leave the room, they just wanted to keep talking with one another.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback inspired Professor Weitzman to look into professionalizing the Happiness Gym, which eventually led to the world premiere of Happiness Gym in Boca Beach at Theatre Lab, a professional theatre in residence at Florida Atlantic University on April 12. The theatre was set up as if you were walking into a bonfire on the beach, with a propped bonfire center stage, the MC playing the ukulele throughout the exercises and other beach-like props scattered around the stage.
Hearing Professor Weitzman talk about the Happiness Gym was incredible, and I think necessary in today’s climate. We so often get caught up in the frantic activities of our daily lives that we frequently fail to appreciate the joys of community and connection; even on a college
Happiness Gym in Boca Beach
campus. I would love to participate in a Happiness Gym, and I think the Stony Brook community would greatly benefit from having our own rendition of Professor Weitzman’s Theatre of Well-Being.