Theater shines spotlight on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder

FRANCESCA BOSTON lifestyles editor

Content Trigger Warning: This story contains discussion of mental health.

A newer play to grace the stage, “Flora Circular ‘’ by Thom May deals with heavy, hard topics, but through dark humor and the humanization of stigmatized mental health struggles bring a show of hope and healing.

The show follows the life of Flora, known as Flo throughout the show, after a psychotic break during her freshman year of college, and how she and her family navigate her new diagnosis.

Adjunct Instructor Jennifer Wintzer said an important element to remember is the fact this show is likely the only time it will exist in this form. This is both because it is such a new work, and the fact that the playwright is living, will be attending the show and may have things to think about after watching the show.

“I think that’s really special about new work, that this particular group of people in this moment in time are creating this, and hopefully bringing his story to light and then the way that honors his work,” Wintzer said.

Senior Jack Gulley, a theater education major from Harrisburg, Illinois, is the stage manager for the show. He said that his role is to keep everything running like clockwork, and that the chance to work with Wintzer, who is coming from a professional setting, has been a big deal.

“[Wintzer] is a guest artist and she’s working as someone who’s not an SIUE faculty, to come in with a different lens, that is really important and that’s really awesome for the student,” Gulley said.

Wintzer said that even though she is coming in as a guest director, it is not uncommon for directors to step in from the outside, and she believes the collaborative nature of theater allows for many disciplines to work together and ask the right kind of questions to bring a story to life.

“The thing about theater— it’s a collaborative art form. In this particular production, we have an intimacy director, we have a stage combat director, because of the different elements in the play,” Wintzer said.

Gulley said being able to work on this play has been exciting for him beyond being able to work with Wintzer, but because he is able to see the cast members, his peers and friends, explore these roles that so few actors have been able to explore before.

“They’re creating these roles. They don’t have other influences like you would have in a more mainstream-produced show,” Gulley said. “It has been a really, really cool opportunity to see the students that we’ve been working with get to come into this show, as well as [Wintzer] and as well as the designers and conceptualize this thing that hadn’t been done before.”

Wintzer said because the play has the ability to shift the environment of the stage through the use of set pieces and the revolve, a circular platform that can be rotated, which allows for the transition of the stage to help maintain the cinematic quality of the show.

“[The cinematic quality] is one of the things I latched on to when reading, making sure that we had an ensemble of actors that no matter what role they were playing, they would help create the different environments because [the play] has many locations,” Wintzer said.

Senior Brooke Holzem, a theater performance major from Washington, Missouri, plays the lead character Flo, which is short for Flora, the play’s title.

Holzem said the dynamic stage, allows the audience to see the flow of someone’s mind, while the background shows the harsh edges of mental illness. She said the lighting and costumes bring a new level to the show.

“[The stage is a] representation of Flo’s mind and the mind of someone with schizophrenia and so the constant moving and the jagged edges of the stage all represent that,” Holzem said.

Junior Brandon Baxter, a theater performance and theater tech major from Louisville, Kentucky, plays Ira, one of the lead characters who struggles with bipolar disorder. Baxter said he spent a lot of time researching, reading firsthand accounts, memoirs and online forums about people’s experiences with bipolar disorder, educating himself to prevent his portrayal from becoming harmful.

“You can see people’s people talk about their struggles, their ups, their downs. They celebrate their wins. It’s really cool. As an outsider, reading things like that, and just going through and trying to figure out as much as I can portray it as accurately as I could, because I don’t want it to be a caricature,” Baxter said.

Holzem described the show as a chance to showcase mental health struggles and the impact of them on families.

“Representation of mental illness and families, in families? Both. Because family really is everything,” Holzem said.

Baxter said watching the show with an open mind is key, understanding that there is still stigma around mental health struggles, but this show allows for the portrayal of the whole story, rather than just the hard times.

“There’s too much media revolving around mental health that focuses on the struggle and the trauma, and not enough that humanizes and uplifts those communities,” Baxter said.

Gulley said the play employs a decent amount of atmospheric sounds, from a running washing machine to background noise in the hospital, or ferry, which are important to building an environment that is both physical and metaphorical.

“Those more atmospheric sounds are important to build a world that we’re living in, and then take it to the metaphor sphere,” Gulley said. “We’re going into a world sometimes that is surreal or that is expressionistic and not realistic. There are sounds like ringing, sounds that are actually captured in the minds of our characters or in the moods of the scenes.”

Baxter said because the show deals with such heavy and complex topics, he and the rest of the cast have created ‘roll in, roll out’ methods where they can come into the character and come out of character with the support of other cast members. Baxter said one particularly vulnerable scene with his character, when the character is particularly broken, weighs heavily on him.

“It’s as vulnerable as a person can get and feeling that every night, it definitely weighs because you feel broken. So whenever I come off stage, I have to get to a mirror and look at me and look myself in the eyes. It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re still there Brandon,’” Baxter said.

Troy Alexander, a fourth-year theater performance major from Detroit, portrays Colin, a support group facilitator. He said the show has taught him to be kind to everyone. Even though it is an emotional rollercoaster, he is glad it is portraying mental health struggles.

“I really feel the message [is] just being kinder to people who struggle with their mental health,” Alexander said.

“Flora Circular” will be shown Feb. 22-26 in Dunham Hall. For more information and tickets, visit the SIUE Theater website.