Next to Normal

As a belated 35th birthday present, one of my former roommates and best friends took me to see the Broadway Hit “Next to Normal” in which the lovely and fantastically talented actress, Alice Ripley, won the Tony and plays the lead character.

The play takes the audience on a journey of watching a middle class family battle, grapple and struggle with a house wife and mother’s debilitating mental illness of Bi Polar Disorder- a condition we learn later in the play that was brought on by a devastating traumatic event in her life in early adulthood. I laughed. I cried. I laughed, then cried again. It was one of the most poignant and riveting musicals I have seen since Spring Awakening.

While this musical is not for everyone, I would highly recommend seeing it. It especially hit home for me. I don’t have bipolar disorder- but having had Anorexia for so much of my life, this musical really made me stop and think. Surely- everyone’s family has their skeleton’s in their closets. No one’s family is “Normal.” But when you have a sick parent or as in the case of my family, a sick child, this play for the first time in my life made me see things from a very different perspective; the affect that the person afflicted with a mental illness has on their loved ones around them.

Be it an eating disorder, substance abuse, depression or any other mental ailment, such illnesses often take a powerful hold over the person suffering from them. The person becomes so wrapped up in their illness that they don’t know who they are anymore. It becomes their identity and while they know it’s upsetting to their family and friends, they lack the mental capacity to truly grasp that those close to them are suffering too watching their son/daughter/friend go through this.

As I watched this performance, I could for the first time recognize and appreciate after all the years of my family seeing me suffer from an eating disorder, what they must have felt and probably still feel like. What do we do? She’s been to every Doctor, been on every freaking drug, even tube fed. We’ve exhausted our finances, the insurance is running out. God damn it and exasperated… WHAT CAN WE DO TO MAKE HER EAT?

The hardest message in this play for me to walk away with was that my family and friends can not answer this question. I can’t answer the question either- but I know that ultimately, the solution and the answer only lies within me. Recovery is not always a smooth process. You are not going to sit on a couch for an hour and walk out cured. Sometimes, it often gets worse before it gets better. I’ve fallen, gotten back up, fallen, and gotten back up again. Not giving the whole plot away, but there is a scene in this play where this mother’s frustration with her illness has hit its breaking point and she says to the therapist she’s ready to flat out give up. He says… “Stay with me. Try again.” I don’t think I have ever walked out of a Broadway play with a line like that replaying in my head over and over again…. not even from Spring Awakening which is now tied for first place with Next to Normal as the best pieces of Modern theatre I have ever seen.