Next To Normal

One night at the kitchen table my girlfriend’s father punched her mother in the face; two sudden hard blows that drew bright red blood.

This weekend Pangdemonium’s stunning production of Next To Normal opened.

Next To Normal, an award winning musical (eleven Tony nominations with three wins; Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2010), tells the story of Diane Goodman, who suffers from bipolar disorder.  While some of the particulars of the story are unique to bipolarity, the anxiety is universal. The play last night brought back memories of my friend’s family, where dysfunctions included alcoholism and battered-spouse syndrome, and memories of other families plagued by schizophrenia, drug addiction, etc.  Those shocking punches changed my reality; the rulebook for life was suddenly rewritten.  Parents didn’t hit each other out of the blue, and if they suddenly did, what was I supposed to do about it? What was she supposed to do?  What was anyone supposed to do?  Ever after there was a nagging feeling, a tension in the gut, a sense that even in calm moments, something might happen, awful and out of control.

Next To Normal gets that just right.  The outstanding cast is headed by Sally Ann Triplett, a West End veteran.  Pardon me for saying that it is a good thing they cast a Triplett, as the part of Diane is too much for just one actress.  Diane doesn’t drift into and out of reality; she lurches from one to another, turning on a dime.  She has to range from seductive, to terrified, to helpless laughter all in the course of introducing herself to a new doctor.  In one of the opening scenes she is packing the family off to work and school.  Slowly, like a truck rolling down a mountain, her happy chatter and morning bustle gain speed, until her baffled and frightened family watches her crawling around the floor slapping peanut butter on bread, an entire loaf’s worth. 

“Sweetheart?” asks her long-suffering husband Dan (Adrian Pang).  “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to get ahead, for lunch! I’m … making sandwiches … on … the floor.”

The play is not flawless.  After creating the memorable Diane, the playwright treated the other characters as afterthoughts: the suffering husband, the overachieving but neglected daughter, her stoner boyfriend – these are types not people.  Luckily, the cast is uniformly excellent, and their performances turn the characters into people we care about.  There are other bits that in lesser hands I might have found myself lashing today.  There is … No, I won’t say reveal it, as it is one of the story’s surprises, but let’s say there is a certain situation that is becoming a trope in stories about mental illness.  Aspiring playwrights take note: when you see the play, and you learn what I am referring to, this trick worked once; you will have to invent a new one.  Then there is the daughter, and drugs.  We know the first time she criticizes her boyfriend’s pot smoking that she will be abusing drugs before the night is over.  That is all too accurate; children in families like this are prone to substance abuse.  What is not accurate is her “choosing” to try the medicine in her mother’s cabinet to numb her own pain.  That is not how it happens, and it plays into an unfortunate stereotype, that all would be well if everyone involved just made “better choices.” The play otherwise makes clear that everyone is trying, everyone is making choices, but to rephrase the famous quote from Apollo 13: Success is not an option.

Playing Natalie the daughter is Julia Abueva.  It is probably unfair to single out one supporting player when all are terrific, but Julia is special. She is only seventeen, playing a character that is older. Just one year older, but it is a part that would normally be cast using an adult actress.  Consider that Linden Furnell who plays Henry, the seventeen-year old stoner boyfriend, is himself twenty-four; and that Nathan Hartono, playing seventeen-year old Gabe, won Teenage Icon eight years ago.  One year ago Julia played Wendla in Pangdemonium’s Spring Awakening, another role where casting a then sixteen-year old was a brave move amply rewarded.  This year she plays Natalie.  Her singing talents are often remarked (she will play the lead in the upcoming production of Cinderella at Resorts World Sentosa), but there are many fine singers.  It is the emotional depth she is already, at her young age, bringing to her performances, that marks her as an actress to keep an eye on.  Let us hope someone writes her the breakout role she deserves.

That is what is great, and sad, about theatre.  Once the Grande Dames “strode the boards,” that was a given.  When film and later television came along, live theatre still ruled; appearing elsewhere was slumming.  Today stage work is still honored, but as an unremunerative eccentricity.   The money is in film work, and “money makes the world go ‘round.”  One of the tragedies of that truth is that singular talents such as Julia and Sally Ann are given short shrift.  A woman of Sally’s age – and she is not old – finds few film scripts coming her way, and certainly not leads.  For Julia it will be worse if she is “discovered.”  She will be ‘rewarded” by choosing between playing Spiderman’s girlfriend (action film), Will Ferrell’s girlfriend (comedy), Richard Gere’s girlfriend (drama), or Harrison Ford’s girlfriend (all three).  Watching the waste of a fine actress forced to battle giant robots in Transformers XII is not what the Greeks meant by tragedy, but tragic it is. 

Thanks god we have live theatre, where actresses as fine as Julia and Sally Ann get to play real parts about real people, and we are lucky enough to see it.