4 interlocking short plays to cast attention on mental illness

Last year, on a balmy Saturday afternoon in the month of June, Jacke Chye walked into the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) at Buangkok. He was one of 70 people who were holing themselves up in IMH for the weekend to write a play in 24 hours for TheatreWorks’ 24-Hour Playwriting Competition.

During the event at IMH, Chye, who is the founder of non-profit theatre company, Playground Entertainment, met the institute’s chief executive officer, associate professor Chua Hong Choon, and told him that he wanted to work on a play about people living with mental health issues.

A year later, after roping in three of his playwright friends — Jean Tay, Dora Tan and Tan Suet Lee — for the project, he contacted IMH again to set it into motion.

The theatrical production State of Mind — a collection of four interlocking short plays about mental health — was born.

Chye, 49, who is known for his work Catching Adam Cheng, which won Action Theatre’s Theatre Idols 2008, had given the three collaborating playwrights a straightforward brief: They were to each write a 30-minute play on a different mental health condition and from a different perspective (for example, from that of a patient, a caregiver or a healthcare professional).

Suet Lee, 51, chose to write about hoarding. The former chartered accountant, who went on to write 11 plays, as well as short stories and poetry, explained that she had wanted “to understand what (drove) hoarders” since observing the phenomenon in her local community.

“The great temptation is to (write) something similar to reality TV,” she said. “I thought the challenge was to write a story on hoarding that’s a bit different, trying to go a bit deeper, into the insecurities, the shame, the guilt of being a child of a hoarder. I wanted to excavate the relationships and the perspectives of what it’s like to grow up in an environment that you have no control over.”

Tay, 42, decided to examine relationships and how they are affected by the practice of self-harm. “I took a more personal approach,” said the award-winning playwright whose plays have been performed in Singapore, the United States, United Kingdom and Italy. Her piece Everything but the Brain is a designated O- and N-Level literature text in secondary schools.

“My daughter had just turned 13 (so) I looked at the stress that teenagers these days are going through. I was concerned about bullying and this phenomenon of self-mutilation,” said Tay.

Her work eventually evolved into a daughter-mother piece. “It’s the struggle to understand and to communicate, issues of control and learning to let go of children as they grow,” she said.

Dora, who chose to write about depression, said IMH had put her in touch with an ex-patient who had suffered and recovered from depression. Describing his story as “extremely moving”, Dora, who is in her 50s, said she had already written an earlier draft, but “chucked it” after speaking to him as she found that it did not depict the condition accurately enough.

Her most important job, she pointed out, was to “make sure that what (she) said (in the play) was authentic”, as the ex-patient had “shared a very vulnerable part” of himself.

“It is more important to be true than to be clever. It’s important to get the facts right because the condition (of depression) is misunderstood even now,” she added. She is known for her stage plays such as A Wedding, A Funeral and Lucky the Fish, which was staged by The Singapore Repertory Theatre in 2014.

SPARKING A CONVERSATION

State of Mind will feature four actors who take on multiple roles in the production — well-known actors Karen Tan and Yeo Yann Yann, as well as newcomers Andrew Mark Ong (last seen in Pangdemonium’s Falling) and Leianne Tan.

Both the playwrights and the actors spoke candidly about their personal experience with psychological distress, or their personal knowledge of friends or relatives who had had such illnesses. Dora and Chye had friends and family who suffered from depression, while Karen and Yeo were open about their own experience of depression.

“It took me a year to realise that I had post-natal depression,” said Yeo. “You feel like the world is crumbling.”

The playwrights suggested that mental illness was still poorly understood in Singapore because its symptoms are often invisible to the onlooker, and many patients prefer to remain invisible to avoid the stigma tied to mental illness.

Dr Kelvin Ng, a consultant at the Department of Community Psychiatry at IMH, agreed, saying: “The results of IMH’s National Mental Health Literacy Study released last year showed that there was fair to low recognition of specific mental health disorders and that there was considerable personal stigma towards mental illness among the Singapore resident population.”

Tay argued that mental health issues in Singapore were significant enough to warrant more public attention and help. “If (mental illness like self-harm) is such a big issue, there should be more conversation about it, and about solutions and treatment,” she said.

Theatre, the playwrights added, was an ideal space to kick-start this much-needed conversation.

“(Theatre) is story-telling,” said Tay. “When people tell stories, you empathise, you go on a journey with the character.”

Dora and Yeo agreed. “It’s sharing emotions, not just information,” said Dora, while Yeo added: “Performances give time and space for people to feel, to release certain emotions.”

“Theatre is such a powerful medium to communicate and to share experiences. These experiences (in States of Mind) are not readily discussed, are hidden, and yet such a part of our community,” said Tay. “It was a privilege to have that insight into that world and to be able to share something of it with a larger audience.”

Chye said that they would be holding question and answer sessions at the end of some performances, involving the cast, director, playwrights and a medical representative from IMH.

Dr Ng said: “We are really pleased to see private initiatives such as this added to the World Mental Health Day’s (Oct 10) calendar of events this year. It is always a good thing when people step up to champion mental health awareness.”

Suet Lee said she hopes the production would kindle a conversation and “create more empathy”. As Dr Ng, whom she had consulted while researching her play, said — they all hope that audience members would leave their production “a little bit more understanding, a little bit more patient, and a little bit more kind” to the psychologically distressed among us.

State of Mind will run from Oct 26 to Oct 29 at Play Den, The Arts House. Tickets at S$35 from http://stateofmind.peatix.com.