“I couldn’t give a flying fuck what’s normal,” sings Dan Goodman during the second act of Next to Normal, the Indie Women production that ran Oct. 15-18 at the Gladstone theatre.
While the character in the play was talking about his bipolar wife, the sentiment about normalcy was one audience members and actors shared on opening night.
CTV anchor Carol Anne Meehan spoke briefly before the performance about her own family’s struggle with the impact of mental illness after her husband’s suicide attempt.
“So often stress manifests itself in the ways we either cope or don’t cope,” she said.
Next to Normal is a Tony award-winning rock musical about suburban wife and mother Diana Goodman’s struggle with bipolar disorder. After 16 years of treatment Diana stops taking medication, and after a suicide attempt undergoes electroshock therapy.
Indie Women put on the production on as a fundraiser for the Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health, said play director C. Lee Bates. The performances were a volunteer effort from the actors involved. After the production costs are covered all funds will go to the hospital, she said.
The production company is focused on bringing socially conscious theatre to the stage, particularly theatre with prominent female roles, Bates said.
Bates said Diana’s “multifaceted, complex character” attracted her and producer Joan Edwards Frommer to the production. She said the opening night performance was “terrifically energized.”
She said she sees Diana’s ultimate choice to leave her family as an admirable one.
“She has the courage in the end to leave a situation that she knows in some ways has crippled her,” she said.
While the subject matter is bleak, Bates said it’s also about hope.
“And you find some way to survive,” Diana sings in the final number. “And you find out you don’t have to be happy at all. To be happy you’re alive.”
As part of her illness, Diana must grapple with frequent hallucinations of her long-dead son, Gabe Goodman. University of Ottawa student and actor Patrick Teed said he enjoyed taking on the unusual role.
Teed said he sees Gabe as “an embodiment of grief and an extension of the person he’s interacting with. So I’m not necessarily the symptom because I feel like interpreting him as a symptom would gave a very flat performance.”
For the cast of the play, the story is an intensely personal one.
Teed and assistant director Rachel Scott-Mignon both spoke of their own struggles with mental illness in a talk-back discussion after the performance.
Scott-Mingon said she’s undergone electroshock therapy and struggled with drug treatments since her diagnosis with bipolar disorder 10 years ago. She said it was “tremendously difficult,” to see her own experiences mirrored in the play.
Teed said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager. He said he loves Next to Normal because of its complex depiction of mental illness.
“I’m bipolar and Rachel’s bipolar but you can’t create a norm in our prognosis,” he said.
“When we create those norms what you’re doing is constructing this acceptable way to live out mental health conditions which are all so inherently personal.”
