Putting mental illness front and centre stage
It’s difficult enough to premiere a new play, but as Anusree Roy’s latest work, Little Pretty and the Exceptional, was officially opening at Factory Theatre last week, she was also revealing a personal secret she both chose and was instructed to keep from colleagues in the Toronto theatre community.
For a year and a half, beginning shortly after her 30th birthday, Roy struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered after she was diagnosed with arthritis in her spinal cord.
“I’ve had things happen before that I’ve turned into art but never revealed. I don’t think you have to reveal the story behind everything you write about. But the reason I changed my mind this time was that it felt hypocritical if I didn’t,” Roy said over the phone from Stratford, where she’s rehearsing as part of the acting company at the Stratford Festival.
“It needs a voice, it needs advocacy, it needs context as to where it’s coming from.”
In both program notes for Little Pretty and an article for the online theatre publication Intermission Magazine, Roy detailed her symptoms, the exercises that slowly led to recovery and her inability to discuss them with anyone — restrained by doctor’s orders, as well as her own fears about her career as a writer and performer.
Not surprisingly, once her story was out in the open, others she knew came forward with their own mental-health issues.
“I think every other message had the word ‘brave’ in it. Honestly, I feel that year and a half was brave. Now I’m well. I’m moving on with my life. But I don’t understand how we haven’t talked about this more. How is this not a point of discussion?” Roy said.
However, open discussion doesn’t happen in Little Pretty and the Ex- Little Pretty and the Exceptional, ceptional either. In the play, which Roy started years before her PTSD symptoms began, the characters — father Dilpreet and daughters Simran and Jasmeet — deal with the effects of Simran’s increasingly unstable mental health as the family tries to open a sari shop on Gerrard St. E.
But the illness, schizophrenia, is never named. According to Roy’s research and experience, the path to diagnosis is too long and complicat- ed to fit into her play, which takes place over several days. But to Factory Theatre’s artistic director Nina Lee Aquino, there’s something else at work in the absence of the word “schizophrenia.”
“In the western world, we have names for that,” Aquino said. “There are no names, or it might be called differently, in our respective cultures. We don’t have categories and that’s why it’s hard to embrace it. It’s hard to talk about it.”
“To be able to label is such a North American thing; to be able to name it is such a North American thing,” Roy agreed.
Overlapping with Little Pretty and the Exceptional to close Factory Theatre’s 2016/17 season is a remount of Leon Aureus’s Banana Boys, directed by Aquino, a play about five young Chinese-Canadian men in present-day Toronto.
“As Little Pretty deals with mental illness, Banana Boys deals with addiction,” Aquino said of the play, which premiered in 2002 and was a surprise hit in 2015 at Factory.
“Usually, in the North American version, addiction is used to escape or fill a void. But taken in the world of Banana Boys, (the character) Rick goes into drug addiction because he thinks it makes him powerful. His thirst for money, for power, for women takes him there. It’s this quest for perfection that he wanted to attain, so his life spirals into addiction.”
Aquino said this drive for perfection is part of what is considered “normal” in Chinese-Canadian culture. A Chinese-Canadian student, for example, may strive for perfect marks in school, but “in the majority white norm, that’s crazy.”
Aureus even draws on the Chinese myth of the Jiangshi, a vampirelike undead creature that feeds off the life force of the living, to represent how someone with addiction ab- sorbs the energy of those around him or her.
“These two plays actually do go together,” Aquino added. “It’s sort of like a love letter to who we are as hyphenated Canadians and how we deal with our demons.
“I wanted to highlight that when we take the streetcar we’re surrounded by all these complex human beings. What happens when Dilpreet’s store closes at night? Or what happens when you see Rick Wong running to his next business meeting in the financial district?
“It’s great that we’re starting to talk about (mental illness) but, before we do and kind of put a blanket statement on mental illness, we have to understand that mental illness translates differently in different cultures.” Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Karen Fricker.