Ixion comedy takes light look at mental illness
As heartbreaking, debilitating and frustrating as mental illness can be, it can also be funny whether you’re experiencing it or just watching it on stage.
Margaret Dulaney mines the humor of mental illness in her play, The View from Here. She also shows that few of us are immune from it and we all have our quirks that can get out of hand and blow up into something truly disabling.
Ixion in Lansing is currently producing Dulaney’s play and in it we see Rachel Mender’s Fern refuse to leave her home because of a fear of marketplaces and of the outdoors in general. When the play opens, her sister Maple (Cassie Little) is in a near-catatonic state on her couch, in shock because her husband of 12 years has left her. Bursting onto the scene is the crazy neighbor Carla (Miranda Hartmann) who believes everything she reads in every tabloid newspaper and magazine. They control her life the way Fern’s fears control hers. Things really begin to change when “Arnold” (Jeff Croff) shows up, so-called because of his love for golf. His wife has left him and taken everything except the crib and the newborn baby.
Mender is a spitfire as Fern. She masters the Kentucky accent and immediately owns the small stage of the Robin Theater. Her Fern may be afraid to go outside, but inside she is the queen of her coop, and she is caretaker for a nursery of babies. Mender gives Fern a delightful energy, one that invites us to laugh with her even when we pity her. She takes us along a full range of emotions and really has us rooting for Fern to conquer her fears and be able to live her life.
Little provides a contrast to her sister in personality, if not in mental health. Little’s Maple has a quieter energy, though explosive when it releases. She is more malleable. Little excels in the scenes where she is describing her husband’s antics and her reaction to them. She has a full range of comic expression and voice.
Hartmann mixes even more comedy onto the stage with her full-on commitment to the outrageous things that Carla says. She speaks them as normally as another person might share the weather, no matter how tragic and unbelievable the story is. She has an energy that matches Mender and the two feed off each other throughout the play.
Croff stepped into the role just this past Monday after the original actor was in a car accident and hospitalized, unable to perform. It was not obvious from his performance that the role was new to him. He adeptly handled the role’s monologues and fulfilled the role of shaking things up for these women. He languorously entered their lives with his sadness over the loss of his wife (and all his furnishings) and quickly came to recognize and analyze correctly each of their quirks and the way it controlled their lives.
Director Sadonna Croff really brought this ensemble together, making good use of all ranges of pacing, from the incredulous silences to the explosions of frustrations. She also choreographed well the movement on this small stage, letting all four move around the set of couch, television, crib and night tables. She also treats each of these characters with sympathy, never mocking them when digging out the humor.
The View From Here is clever and humorous, never mean but always unrelenting in examining the ways that fears limit people and the search for hope in what seems hopeless. It’s worth going to see for the laughs, and the entertainment, but it is also uplifting in its ultimate message and the way the people in the play care for each other.