Funny girl Marshall making her pain count

For Niagara-raised comic Shelley Marshall, life is about riding the extremes.

Earlier this year, her career hit a peak with a performance of her one-woman show Hold Mommy’s

Cigarette at a packed JW Ennis Auditorium in Welland. It raised $13,000 for E.L. Crossley Secondary School’s new mental wellness committee, established after a recent student suicide.

Yet, almost immediately after that triumphant night, Marshall fell into another one of her dark phases. Days when her ongoing battle with depression threatened to consume her.

Marshall’s father killed himself when she was seven years old. She attempted her own suicide 17 years ago. Every year, it seems, she hits another rock bottom before pulling herself up. It usually involves the stage, where Hold Mommy’s Cigarette has been a revelatory show for people sharing her pain.

“I’ve had men come up to me and say, ‘Shelley, I lost my brother to suicide when I was 16 and this is the first time I’ve ever told someone.’ I’ve met people for coffee who were going to take their life that day, and got them to the hospital.

“Even just embracing people after the show, you’re taking in their energy. You can feel their pain, you can feel them shivering.”

Eight months after packing the Welland Centennial Secondary School auditorium with 700 people, she returns Sept. 10 and 11 for a pair of shows to benefit Women’s Place of South Niagara.

“It was just a beautiful evening,” she recalls. “The best I’ve ever experienced. I mean, I’ve had intimate shows that are just as powerful for me, but there was something special about that night.”

The show has Marshall playing different characters throughout her life, trying to make sense of the wreckage depression has left behind. She ultimately invites the audience to put her back together by the end. And, oh yeah, it’s a comedy. One that brings audience members back to se it with friends and family the next time.

“People are fearful. What’s this play about? How can you make suicide funny? But it’s done through the characters of my life,” she says. “There’s this joyful, comedic way of expressing the tragedy without making it completely about tragedy.

“The end result is, we do not have to live the lives of our parents. We do not have to repeat the cycles. I end up saying ‘I don’t believe I was mentally ill, I was mentally ill equipped.’”

The Sept. 10 show will be especially poignant for Marshall as it falls on World Suicide Prevention Day. In Niagara, where someone dies of suicide every nine days, 11 of the 12 municipalities have signed proclamations recognizing the day (Niagara-on-the-Lake is the exception, says Marshall, because it only proclaims historical events).

Draining as it is, Marshall performs the show about 100 times a year. She recently re-mortgaged her Toronto loft, which she shares with Jason, her husband of 31 years, in order to take Hold Mommy’s Cigarette across the country.

No matter where it’s performed, she says, someone has a story for her afterwards.

“My school teacher from Grade 5 came five times when I was doing it in Hamilton,” she says. “Every night he was crying afterwards, and I finally said ‘Why are you crying?’ He said, ‘Shelley, I’m a school teacher, I should have known what was going on in your life.’

“I looked at him and said, ‘But I’m an actress!’ A lot of us hide it very well, but I’m just willing to speak publicly about it.” jlaw@postmedia.com