(Autumn Clark), in Committed. Photo Credit: Carolina Gao
RALEIGH, NC – Lurid, sensationalized depictions of neuroatypical people have long – and quite profitably – stalked the broadest stages of musical theater. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard (whose most recent revival just opened on Broadway), Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Sweeney Todd, and of course the titanic rock operas The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall would have to top even the briefest of lists. (Add Hair as a theatrical palate cleanser: while the leads in those other sturm-und-drangers grappled all night long with clearly altered mental states, the countercultural Aquarians spent a refreshing amount of time on stage in the exuberant pursuit of them instead.)
Still, it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that musicals started to deal with neurodivergence in more nuanced and empathetic ways. In 2003, the luscious, Tony award-winning Light in the Piazza adapted Chapel Hill novelist Elizabeth Spencer’s book about a young woman with developmental disabilities falling in love with a local during a trip to Italy. Next To Normal won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2008 when it candidly owned, accepted and explored the impact of a mother’s mental illness in the everyday life of a white suburban middle-class American family.
Given the plot of that musical, though, they probably weren’t living in North Carolina.
For decades now, the state has had one of the most deficient and dysfunctional public systems for behavioral health in the country. Since 2000, North Carolina has cut the number of state psychiatric hospital beds by almost half. With only two-thirds of the remaining ones available due to chronic shortages in staff (from a present workforce that can only meet 13 percent of the state’s needs), those experiencing psychological emergencies must presently wait 16 days on average for admission. A national advocacy group ranks North Carolina as the 11th worst state in the nation for access to psychological treatment.
In the last year or so, the state has begun to devote significant funding to the problem: over $800 million in a bid to transform state behavioral health services.
But in 2013, when Durham composer Carly Campbell inadvertently found herself admitted into the system, her attempt to find emergency psychiatric help abruptly plunged her into a traumatic experience all its own. She experienced the protocols, confirmed by industry sources, for emergency patients who have to be transported from a hospital without available psychiatric beds to one that has them.
Given a hospital gown to wear with her clothes and cell phone confiscated, Campbell was placed in handcuffs and shackles by two law enforcement officers. Both then took her firmly by her arms, put her in the back of a police car and drove her to another hospital, 90 minutes away.
That was the beginning of Campbell’s odyssey into our state’s public mental health system.
She survived the experience.
Phoebe (Micaela Deadwyler) with backup singers, in Committed. Photo Credit: Carolina Gao
Then she decided to make a musical about it.
Campbell and her creative team stress that Committed: The Musical is still deep in development, with a professional production planned for 2025 following its current, notable world premiere from a student company at Meredith College. Under assistant professor Lormarev Jones, who helms this work knowledgeably and with integrity, this autobiographically-based account already demonstrates bravery, resilience, integrity – and an unexpected amount of wit.
That’s because – perhaps most unexpectedly of all – the two-hour work is, in large part, a comedy.
In its present form, Committed stands as a strange, authentic internal document of several things. It speaks, in a clear voice, of a harrowing internal pilgrimage a woman makes, stepping off the path that meds had made for her, into ecstatic and unsustainable instability, before finding a fraught road back to coherence.
The hospital MC (Davi Cunningman), in Committed. Photo Credit: Carolina Gao
This millennial remembrance of things past also evokes a delicate, liminal time among a small queer community of housemates and friends: some just out of college and not entirely certain of their next steps, awakening to the demands of adulting, and gradually becoming aware that one among them – the drama kid, Phoebe – is in trouble. Though it remains unclear how long these fractious, self-centered and caring tenants at a group house dubbed “The Hag’s Nest” can stay in this temporary constellation, in this moment, they are there for each other.
That’s a good thing. They’re all needed.
That’s because Phoebe (Micaela Deadwyler in the play’s first act) is already well into her spinout when we first meet. After fifteen backup singers wielding white feather fans (exquisitely led by music director Keith Lewis) abruptly duck out of the over-amped all-singing, all-dancing opening song, “Thrive,” the number dumps Phoebe and us into what’s actually going on. In reality, she’s dancing, alone, to a hallucinated playlist on the countertop at the campus coffeeshop where she marginally works. Upon realizing this, Phoebe segues, unphased, into a series of delighted – and decidedly manic – greetings with disgruntled customers, friends and ultimately, her housemates.
The prickly and prematurely world-weary Evan (Elaina Briggs-Clark) is preoccupied with terrorizing the incoming first-year students. “Welcome to your future, children,” she darkly intones. “Turn back while you still can.” Meanwhile, blonde (and apparently only recently gay) party girl Isa (MacKenzie Kotch) is hiding from her disastrous first girlfriend, while Rae (Blue Wise) snarks on basically everything. This leaves Liv (a focused Autumn Clark), who’s just started grad school in social work, to wonder what’s up with Phoebe’s strange floor show jag.
Though the rest chalk it up to drama diva hijinks, a series of inappropriate focus-pulling social interactions, punctuated by solemn passages alone, indicate Phoebe’s decaying manic orbit and impending crash landing. Along the way, Campbell and a phalanx of fellow songwriters shift gears through a funny, would-be but not quite punk anthem for privileged college kids (“Everything is Bad”), a raucous feminist hip-hop rip on gender-based income inequality at the local gay bar (“Dolla on the Dolla,” delivered with authority by A’Kira McCassling), and “Carolina Rose,” a pensive folk meditation on a southern college town scene that the singers realize they’re growing out of.
After that, Phoebe takes us down the rabbit hole of a psychiatric crisis that’s exacerbated by the ones who should be helping her. When Campbell has different actors (Bri Long and Gabrielle Spehar) play Phoebe in Committed‘s second and third acts, they represent the character’s dissociation, while feeding into a central conceit of the drama.
Through most of the work, Phoebe is convinced her life is a musical – the one we’re presently viewing. As she’s being admitted, Phoebe reacts with panic: she doesn’t want “them” to see this part of the story. When the doctor asks who, she says, “The audience!… [T]his is supposed to be a lighthearted but triumphant story about a girl who has finally gotten all the love and attention she deserves! It’s supposed to be a fun, inspirational sing-a-long time and now – what, they have to watch THIS SHIT? NO WAY!”
Rae (Blue Wise) and Liv (Autumn Clark), in Committed. Photo credit: Carolina Gao
The songs and the ride both veer out of her character’s control from that point, in a descent into a psychiatric underworld. A sinister master of ceremonies (convincing Davi Cunningham) orients her to the new order of things in a dark bluesy take-off on the song “Sixteen Tons” (“The Second Floor”), before a beleaguered group therapist leads a sextet of patients through a useless affirmation dolled up as a Sound of Music tribute (“Do Re Mi DBT”). To get her back on her meds, a quartet of drugs themselves send up a silly, soulful, torch song number, “Hold Me Tight,” in one of the evening’s most imaginative sequences.
Further challenges await after this Eurydice reenters the real world, but Phoebe’s community coalesces for her in the emotional closing song, “Try and Give Up.”
At this stage in its development, some sequences in Committed do connect more fully and directly with us than others. There’s a sense of broken pavement in places where songs still unwritten or unready for release haven’t been integrated into the script. At this writing, several numbers feel like rough cuts – although that’s actually part of the point and charm in “Bed Rock” and “Everything is Bad.” One or two other numbers are too brief to make much of an impression.
But at its strongest, Committed documents a turning time, as it probes the resilience and the fragility of interconnections among several communities. These include the patients caught in the Hades of a dysfunctional public mental health system, an always contingent and temporal circle of college friends and the larger queer community. Crucially for this show, they also include this golden possibility: a community, united and unified, within and among a divided self.
Committed: The Musical has one more performance on Saturday, November 16 at Meredith College. Tickets are free.
