PL AYBILL happy place
world premiere
Happy place pamela mala sinha }{
approximate running time: 2 hourS 35 minutes. there will be one 20 min intermission
ARTIST NOTE: PAMELA MALA SINHA
In my solo play Crash, the character of the ‘Girl’ talks about the time she spent at a hospital for women suffering from depression. In an early draft of the play I had written monologues for some of the residents; I wanted to capture the complexity of depression and show how these women were able to reach each other in a way no one else could (however different their circumstances) through their compassion, their humour and sometimes, even their conflicts. I showed the draft, which I hoped was rehearsal ready, to the dramaturge Iris Turcott and the director Daniel Brooks – knowing they would give me two brilliant, and very different sets of notes. And they did. But the one thing they agreed on?
Me: But not everyone experiences depression in the way the “Girl” does; these women have their own stories to tell… So give them their own play. The philosopher Richard Rorty said that art gives us “the imaginative ability to see strange people – those oppressed by humiliation, cruelty and pain – as fellow sufferers”… to imagine what it is to be another person. I wrote about the characters I removed from Crash because I wanted to imagine more deeply what it was like to be these women. It is my hope that you may recognize yourself, or someone you love - maybe even someone you have yet to meet… in a line, or a moment, in this Happy Place.
Get those women out of this play. Pamela Mala Sinha, Play wright and Kathleen in Happy Place