New play and film about mental-health struggles are well suited to pandemic moment

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The importance of talking about and sharing struggles with mental health are the focus of two theatre-related projects happening in Toronto in the coming weeks.

After 19 months of pandemic uncertainty and restrictions, it’s a topic that’s understood around the world.

The play “True,” written and directed by Rosa Laborde and premiering Oct. 29 as part of Workman Arts’ Rendezvous with Madness festival, depicts a family grappling with its aging father’s experience of Alzheimer’s disease, and features a Q&A with the cast following every performance. It is the inaugural production in the new, state-of-the-art CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) Auditorium on Queen St. W.

The film “Lessons in Temperament,” whose screenings begin Nov. 13 at Toronto’s Meridian Arts Centre, has its origins in a solo stage play of the same name written and performed by James Smith. In the show, Smith tuned a piano over the span of 90 minutes and talked about growing up in a family of four boys, all of whom struggled with mental-health challenges including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now, theatre company Outside the March has filmed Smith performing his monologue while tuning pianos in theatres around southern Ontario, and the film will be screened at three of these theatres, as well as streamed online.

Both of these projects grew out of Laborde and Smith’s personal experience — though, in Laborde’s case, she did not realize the extent of this until it was reflected back to her.

“True,” first produced as part of the 2014 Toronto Fringe Festival, was inspired by Shakespeare’s play “King Lear,” in particular the theme of “the things that are done that you can’t undo,” says Laborde. “Regret. A father losing himself and then coming to his three daughters for help. But they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, you weren’t there for us.’”

When her aunt and uncle came to see the show, they said to Laborde that she was writing about their family. “I was like, ‘What, what?’” recalled Laborde. “Because my grandfather did have dementia … it was really interesting to discover the unconscious things you’re working on as an artist without being aware of them.”

Laborde brought research into neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganize itself — into the play, as well as an interest in multiverse theory: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes in addition to our own. “There are trauma wounds that we have, we are circling throughout our lives … maybe trying to heal from,” said Laborde.

She is interested in “that moment before, where a different choice could be made” in a difficult situation. Perhaps the play might prompt an audience member to “see something differently,” to identify “the moment before the reaction, the moment before I do a thing that is irreparable,” said Laborde.

When Kelly Straughan, former executive director of the Toronto Fringe, moved to Workman Arts in 2017 to become its executive artistic director, she continued a conversation with Laborde about remounting the play in Rendezvous with Madness, the first and largest mental health festival in the world. “True” is the only live performance in this year’s festival, which also includes 68 films from 18 countries, a symposium, and workshops for the public and arts professionals.

A central feature of the CAMH Auditorium is floor-to-ceiling windows “so that it feels like something that’s accessible to people, rather than something you’re hiding away behind a wall,” said Straughan. There is a system of blinds and curtains in the auditorium, but Laborde and her design team are not using them for this production to “embrace what the intention was with the space,” said Laborde — to literally as well as metaphorically open up perspectives on mental health.

As does “True,” “Lessons in Temperament” has a years-long theatrical backstory. The show, directed for both stage and screen by Mitchell Cushman, premiered to excellent reviews in the 2016 SummerWorks Festival and then had another run produced by Cushman’s company Outside the March. It was performed in intimate and offbeat locations including people’s homes, churches, and a Loblaws — “anywhere there was a piano in need of tuning,” said Cushman.

Sharing personal material in the show was something new for Smith, not because he’d kept his experience a secret but because he didn’t think it was notable.

“I shared a bedroom with my brother, Joey, who’s autistic, for the first 10 years of my life,” said Smith. “It was later in life that it occurred to me that these were things worth sharing, simply because it was utterly normal to me.”

When COVID-19 hit, Smith and Cushman had been talking with the Stratford Festival about presenting “Lessons in Temperament” in its 2020 Meighan Forum series. In thinking about the relevance of the show during the pandemic, they hit on the idea of remaking it as a film.

“It already was pretty clear that COVID was going to be a huge catalyst for people struggling across the mental-health spectrum,” said Cushman. “It felt like we were living through a time where it felt really important to try to still tell this story,” he said, and to work with theatres which were otherwise sitting empty, with their pianos likely going out of tune. “Every single theatre we asked said yes,” said Cushman.

Over six months, rolling with the punches of lockdowns and other restrictions, Cushman and director of photography Gabriela Osio Vanden filmed Smith performing in 12 different spaces in nine different buildings from Brampton to Stratford to Barrie, and numerous locations in Toronto. All box-office proceeds from screenings will go to the mental health-affiliated charities including CAMH, EveryMind, Homes First, Kerry’s Place, and Stella’s Place.

Smith believes that art can help people through difficult times. “There’s a moment in the show where I talk about the first time I Googled OCD,” he said. “I thought it was just me, this list of things, but then I saw it that it was out in the world and it had a name … there was a deep, deep level of comfort in that,” said Smith. “I hope that simply hearing a fully normalized story of mental health, where everything is OK, could potentially help someone know that they’re not alone.”

“True” plays at the CAMH Auditorium, 1025 Queen St. W., from Oct. 29-30, Nov. 1-2, and Nov. 4-5. Tickets at Workmanarts.com. Information about live and virtual screenings of “Lessons in Temperament” from Nov. 13-24 is at OutsidetheMarch.ca.





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