Star Power

Regina Compernolle was working toward her master’s degree in psychology when she called it quits. She was still interested in psychology, but something was missing.

“It didn’t deal with the spiritual level at all,” she explains.

On her own, Compernolle started studying more experimental schools of thought — Jungian psychology and astrology. Now she’s combining the two with an event of her own invention: the Astrodrama.

Compernolle wants to see what will happen when she applies the psychodrama technique — in which actors portray different aspects of one person’s consciousness — to a person’s astrological chart. In a typical psychodrama, one actor might play the voice of a person’s mother while another acts out the voice of that same person’s father. But in Compernolle’s Astrodrama, one performer will take on the role of Mars, the hotheaded warrior, and another will portray Venus, the sensual, lovey-dovey goddess. The moon will take care of mundane things like housework and bills. Pluto will be the wizard behind the curtain, the brainiac.

This week is the first Astrodrama session, so folks who show up will probably work with the chart of some famous person rather than with a member of the group. For that, Compernolle plans to wait until people are comfortable with each other. She hopes the group can eventually delve deeper, acting out planetary changes and how they’re likely to affect people from one month to the next — like a spiritually informed soap opera in which all the characters are actually parts of you.

Compernolle’s own Astrodrama should be a pretty lively show. “I’ve got a lot of oppositions in my chart,” she says. “I have to have a balance. If I go too much with the Uranus energy, the other energy’s like, AAAAHH!”