Lawrence.com

(Note to reader: like many blogs out there, this contains a couple salty words.)

The first time I read the script for Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, I was sitting in the dayroom at Kansas City Research Hospital. That’s a loony bin, by the way. I was there detoxing from a four-month long bender. (Note: self-medicating major depression with alcohol? Not a great idea. That way lies madness, and liver failure, and suicide, or at the very least a bad case of the DTs.)

I know people who were unable to read past the first page of this play. “It hurts too bad,” they said. And these are people who have never been institutionalized, even! A particularly empathetic young man who had volunteered to run the lights for the production had to bow out halfway through our first tech rehearsal, out of fear that he’d pass out mid-performance. While I was composing this blog, I was messaged on FaceBook by someone recently treated for mental illness, wanting to know if this show was “safe” for her to see. Yeah, it’s that bleak. It’s that dark. It’s that fucking good.

Anyway, the first time I read it, half-looped on Librium and seeing things move out of the corner of my eye, I didn’t quite know what to think. It’s abstract. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, at least not for the stage. It’s more poem than play. The script has no scene delineations, no character assignments, just 30-some pages of gorgeously-worded pain, with a lot of “fuck”s thrown in for good measure. It resonated with me, as someone who’s battled with depression for half my life, who’s tried to die on one occasion, but I had no freaking clue how one would go about staging it. (I’m an actor, not a director.) My first thought, on finishing it, was “This is either going to be really, really great, or a piece of utter shit.”

Luckily, Dan Born is a director, and a damn good one, at that. Aside from having the excellent judgment to cast me in his production, he’s managed to take the most abstract play I’ve ever come across and make it real and accessible. From a pile of proetry that seems more incoherent rambling than narrative, he picked out four distinct voices—a therapist, a central voice in extreme suffering, and the two evil fucks who live inside her head. (I get to be one of those evil fucks—how fun is that? It’s been good for me to be on the other end of that, for once.) Several of us involved in the production have fought against mental illness, and he had the grace to take our input, and that of those participants who are perfectly sane but unusually insightful, into consideration when hacking out a meaningful performance. It’s not the production I had in my sick head when I read it—it’s a thousand times better.

This show hurts. It’s raw and unforgiving and brutal. That’s because it’s unflinchingly honest. The playwright never lived to see it performed; she offed herself shortly after its publication, and all of the despair and pain and humor and passion that drove her to that act is flayed open, laid bare, in this 78-minute suicide note. She dies again, and again, and again, every time it’s performed. In a really perverse way that only those who’ve fought that same blackness can ever understand, I am honored and humbled and excited to be a part of that continuum of death. Am I glad she caught the bus? Hell, no. Am I glad to participate in her ongoing memorial murder? Yeah, I have to admit, I am.

And I’m also exceedingly glad that the folks at Bert Nash (which godsend the proceeds of this show benefit, I must add) are hosting a talk-back session with the cast and director after each performance. (Two shows are left, tonight and tomorrow night.) The show is great, but the dialogue that takes place afterward, between crazy folks and the people who treat crazy folks and the people who portray crazy folks and all of us who fall into one or more of those categories . . . well. That’s every bit as powerful and affecting as the play itself, but unlike the play, that dialogue is positive and helpful and hopeful. I think Sarah would like that, very much.