‘A story I was compelled to tell’
New play challenges us to understand mental health
Producer, director and playwright Paddy Gillard-Bentley has long been a stalwart of this region’s performing arts community.
She is best known as founder and artistic director of Flush Ink Productions and its roster of ongoing projects — UnHinged Festival of Disturbing Theatre; Write or Flight playwriting challenge; Urban Scrawlers playwright’s collective; She Speaks, Women’s Work — Women’s Words; and the Asphalt Jungle Shorts site specific theatre initiative on the streets of downtown Kitchener.
It’s a role that Gillard-Bentley was born into. As the bio she often uses recounts, “Paddy has been involved in one aspect of theatre or another since her mother, Tessa, was four months pregnant with her performing in Time Out For Ginger.”
This was with the venerable Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre group, not long after arriving in Canada with husband, jazz musician Bill Gillard.
As it happens, the K-W Little Theatre’s stage is where Flush Ink is presenting its next offering: the world première of “Accidental Fish,” written and directed by Paddy Gillard-Bentley.
It opens this Thursday, Aug. 9, and runs for six performances ending Saturday, Aug. 18.
It may come as a surprise to learn this is only the second time Flush Ink Productions is offering a full length work. It follows last summer’s presentation of Gillard-Bentley’s “Shaking the Dew from the Lilies,” also at K-W Little Theatre. Set in the 1980s, this groundbreaking comedy premièred at The Registry Theatre in 2002.
“Accidental Fish,” in contrast, is a new work that is centred around much darker themes.
It grew out of the experience of watching a close friend fighting, and ultimately losing, a battle with mental illness.
The publicity materials describe the play’s main character, Vanessa, as someone for whom “life isn’t easy”.
She’d “be the first to say she’s living life badly. Depression, anxiety, recreational drugs, cigarettes, coffee and a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals washed down with Bailey’s Irish Cream. Suicide is always on Vanessa’s mind.”
When I spoke with Paddy Gillard-Bentley this week, she underscored the relevance a line of dialogue from the script that is printed on all the posters and lure cards. On being encouraged to carry on, Vanessa says “I’m afraid if I kill all my demons, all my angels will die too.”
There is more about the “dark origins” of “Accidental Fish” in an interview with the writer/ director conducted by Alan Li, who is working at MT Space as a marketing assistant through the Canada Student Jobs program (check out his blog mtspace.ca).
“I have, and have had, so many friends and acquaintances suffering from mental illness,” Gillard-Bentley explains to Alan Li.
“I’ve often wondered whether the mental illness precedes the addictions, or the addictions are part of mental illness.”
She came to the realization that while her friend’s life may have been short, “she left behind an important story; a story I was compelled to tell, because she can’t tell it anymore.”
People who have faced loss through suicide are often told “there is nothing you could have done.”
But Gillard-Bentley doesn’t find comfort in such a message. She knows, deep down, that it isn’t true. Just talking with someone can help them get over the hill, even if it’s just once more, for someone who has to face climbing the same steep incline day after day.
“Accidental Fish” doesn’t offer any clear answers on Vanessa’s plight.
“My hope,” the playwright says, “is for the audience to realize they are not alone, either in having a friend in crisis, or suffering from any disturbances of the psyche.
“I would love for the audience to experience even a nanosecond of what it would be like to be her.”