A musical that explores the impact of mental illness on a modern family opens this week at the Weston Playhouse Theatre.
“Next to Normal” by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, won the Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards for its 2009 Broadway production.
The topic of mental illness and the havoc it wreaks on families has fascinated playwrights since the days of Shakespeare and Euripides. But contemporary culture adds new twists to those age-old themes.
There’s the pressure to conform to the image of the typical happy family presented in Hollywood and on television.
Advances in treatment and new psychoactive drugs offer hope and help that wasn’t there before. But they often involve tradeoffs that add new layers of complexity to the struggle.
In ‘Next to Normal’ a suburban family of four confronts these issues, along with the timeless themes of grief, love, loss and denial.
The mother Diana has suffered from bipolar disorder since the death of a child seventeen years earlier.
Broadway veteran Heidi Blickenstaff, who plays and sings the part of Diana, says her character has been spiraling since then.
“We see her grappling with different medications and with not being on medication,” Blickenstaff says. She adds that Diana has tried every typed of therapy, including hypnosis.
“And she struggles with every single type of help she gets.”
Blickenstaff says her character is extremely magnetic, witty and loving, but those qualities are obscured by the chaos in her mind.
“It’s pretty torturous,” Blickenstaff says, “Because you are trying to manage, just trying to make it through day and trying to have a normal life and trying not to take your entire family down with you.”
But like it or not, her family is on the ride.
Diana’s overachieving daughter Natalie lives in fear of becoming like her mother. Margo Seibert, who plays the part, says her mother’s grief over the loss of her first child has kept Natalie and Diana from forming a normal mother-daughter bond.
But they keep reaching.
In one scene Diana finds Natalie still busy with homework at four am.
Diana asks Natalie if she’s okay.
“It’s four in the morning!” Diana says.
Natalie responds with an agitated litany of her assignments and obligations.
Diana tells her daughter that she needs to slow down. Then she leaves, saying, “I’m going to go have sex with your father.” Natalie responds sarcastically to this unwanted information, and goes on to wonder musically if other families are like hers.
In ‘It’s Just Another Day,’-- one of 39 songs in the show -- the family members each describe a very different version of the struggle to keep the family functioning.
The story unfolds through a series of emotionally riveting plot twists and surprises.
“You also discover that it’s not only Diana who has issues that she’s grappling with,” says Broadway veteran Michael Berresse, who directs the Weston production.
“The truth,” Berresse says, “Is that every character in the show is suffering to varying degrees with grief and denial and with coping, and trying to get by.”
As the play opens, Diana has been on a relatively even keel, thanks to a cocktail of psycho-active drugs.
But a minor incident sets her off on a psychotic episode, which sends her back to her therapist, who changes her medication. Blickenstaff says the cost is high.
“Even though it takes away the mania,” she adds, “It also takes away everything passionate, everything that was glorious and vibrant and exciting.”
Diana sings about it in the song,“I miss the Mountains.”
Diana’s inability to feel leads her to flush her medication down the toilet, which results in chaos and new surprises.
Michael Berresse, the director, says the show doesn’t demonize psychopharmacology. It doesn’t offer any easy solutions.
“It’s messy, because life is messy,” he says.
Although the play deals with grief, Barresse says, it’s also about reconciliation and hope and the realization that -- as Diana learns -- you don’t have to be happy to be happy to be alive.
The Weston production of “Next to Normal" runs through July 27.
