Mental illness gets a human face

To fully appreciate the journey of Pamela Mala Sinha’s play Happy Place, we have to go back to 2012 and Sinha’s Dora Award–winning playwriting debut, her one-woman show, Crash.

Though not strictly memoir, Crash was inspired by Sinha’s own experiences and her heartbeat pulses under the words. She was brutally raped by a stranger when she moved to Montreal to begin theatre school, and experienced a breakdown and hospitalization several years later, suffering from PTSD and becoming increasingly suicidal.

Her traumas are the bones upon which Crash is built, and the way she turns her harrowing experiences into art is cathartic, of course, but it’s more than that. Crash is an act of generosity, and the narrative Sinha maps so beautifully in its pages informs the basis of her follow-up, the emotionally wrenching and darkly funny Happy Place, which premiered in Toronto in 2015.

“One of Pamela’s lines in Crash refers to the facility where she went: ‘Broken women determined to die helping each other live,’ and that’s what this play is,” director Roy Surette tells the Straight during a visit to the Post at 750, where rehearsals are under way. “She said there were so many extraordinary stories there, so she took what her experience was and decided to shine a light on a bunch of different women from very diverse backgrounds.”