One month after the towers fell, in October 2001, playwright John Van Slyke was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
“As you can imagine, everyone was on edge,” he said to me, recalling that anxious moment for the American psyche during a recent conversation. “I was stuck with this diagnosis and I didn’t know what to do or make of it.”
What Van Slyke did know, “as time went on,” was “that I needed to write about it,” even though it “took 20 years and a lot of reflection” before he was able to determine how.
The result, BITh (Bizarre Intrusive Thoughts), received a bracing reading this past Saturday afternoon under the auspices of Milwaukee’s Pink Umbrella Theater Company, founded in 2018 with the mission of providing a platform for actors, artists, and designers living with disabilities. The reading was Pink Umbrella’s entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.
As its title suggests, BITh revolves around the thoughts – embodied Saturday by Haley Ebinal, Clayton Mortl, and Nina Ceccato – thwarting efforts by Dee (Kara Penrose) to live their life (Van Slyke deliberately wrote Dee as a gender fluid character to reflect the “general idea that this can happen to anybody”).
Watching Dee’s chorus of intrusive thoughts Saturday afternoon reminded me of the trio of voices living inside the head of the young woman in Grace Stormer’s Sticky, one of the plays I’d seen on another Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, as part of Carroll University’s World Premiere Wisconsin entry.
But the intrusive thoughts afflicting Dee are both more “bizarre” and more ominous; they include continually repeated admonitions about not backing over a neighbor’s foot or throwing a baby into a fan as well as stern commands to wash one’s hands. Like the “shadowman” Dee sees on the wall as a “dark presence,” such intrusive thoughts aren’t just annoying. They’re terrifying.
“The details of the bizarre intrusive thoughts are my details,” Van Slyke told me. “This is my story.”
“When I was at my worst, I was washing my hands every time I thought about touching something,” Van Slyke said, recalling how, as with Dee, his hands grew sore as a result. “My hands hurt just looking at yours,” Dee’s friend O (Alayna Perry) tells them.
“At my worst, it took me 45 minutes to get out the door” and go to work in the morning even after being dressed and ready to leave, Van Slyke recalled, asking me to “imagine how early you must get up” to just get to work on time if your affliction has reached such extremes.
“Any ritual that disrupts or disturbs your daily life” in this way is a “bad ritual,” Van Slyke said.
One didn’t need to witness the daily struggles of Penrose’s Dee to accept the truth of these words. But watching Dee do battle with their intrusive thoughts – whose periodic arrival during the course of the play can’t be predicted and is therefore consistently startling – drives home how challenging such a life could be.
Fighting Back Through Theater
But even as Dee shares their stories about how bizarre intrusive thoughts can upend the rhythm of everyday life – including their eroding relationship with O – they’re simultaneously insisting that “[w]hile the affliction lives in my body, it isn’t me. It’s a diagnosis.”
Armed with that diagnosis, Dee courageously determines to share the “me” that is more than their intrusive thoughts; even as we watch their OCD play out in real time through disabling rituals, they begin shaping a different and better way to tell us who they are, by using the more constructive ritual of theater to craft and communicate a new story.
But what sort of play can adequately capture and convey Dee’s experience? “My mind’s been all over the place and nowhere to be found,” Dee says to us early on. “Do you wanna take a seat?”
How might Dee tell a story that can make us sit down and pay attention?
There’s a running thread through BITh involving Dee’s rejection of various forms of dramatic storytelling that aren’t up to the job.
BITh won’t, Dee says, be the sort of play requiring audience participation. Nor will it be educational theater reminiscent of Sesame Street (“there’s not much wrong with Sesame Street. This just isn’t it,” Dee says).
Given the presence of O, BITh won’t be what Dee labels a “one-person evening.” “The disease doesn’t affect just the person going through this,” but also “affects others in their circle,” Van Slyke pointed out.
Although Dee is a writer like Van Slyke,” Dee tells us that BITh also won’t be a profile of an artist’s struggle for recognition on the road to publication and fame.
Finally, Dee informs us, BITh won’t be yet another “well-made play.” Any new ritual they create, Dee continues, will need to follow the avant-garde’s lead and break such traditional, confining rituals (“a well-made play has its limits,” Van Slyke said to me).
What’s left?
Something much like BITh itself, trying to communicate what OCD is like with the sort of breaks, interruptions, and digressions through which Dee regularly loses their way even as they persist in moving forward.
The result doesn’t just feel more true to Dee’s experience. It’s also all the more moving for daring to tell that truth through a fractured form that matches the play’s disruptive content. Much like Pink Umbrella itself, BITh dares to believe that theater is capacious enough to accommodate such difference, allowing someone like Dee to communicate with and be seen by an audience.
“At a minimum, people need to feel accepted, seen, heard, and safe,” Dee tells us, toward play’s end.
But BITh goes still further, daring to dream far more than temporary shelter from the brain’s raging storms.
In initially channeling and then containing Dee’s bizarre intrusive thoughts, BITh imagines how creative rituals of the kind that theater makes possible might supplant the destructive rituals threatening to tear Dee apart.
Dee expressly tells us that such a new way of seeing doesn’t mean returning to some prelapsarian moment, before intrusive thoughts came tumbling in to banish Dee from Eden. Obsessing over such an imaginary return is not, Dee tells us, “very productive”; indeed, it could even exacerbate the very disease Dee hopes to contain.
Dee’s final, more modest proposal involves sharing a play like the one we’ve watched them create and perform – a process through which destructive “loops” have been identified, embodied, and thereby domesticated so that they might be replaced with a new kind of music.
Bringing such shadows into the light makes them shrink, leaving the stage to Dee to play their own song. No wonder, toward play’s end, that Dee breaks into a celebratory dance while listening to The Field’s “Looping State of Mind.” Walking down Wisconsin Avenue afterward in a clearing sky, there was an added spring in my step, too.
If you want to learn more about Pink Umbrella’s now-concluded reading of BITh, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/bith-bizarre-intrusive-thoughts/.
