Commercial Appeal, Thursday, October 3, 1991

'Alice' drama gives voice to psychosis

by DIANA AITCHISON

WHAT: Alice's Adventures in...Understand?!, an original drama about mental illness written by Bill Baker.
WHERE: University Center, Memphis State University, during the Consumer Speaks conference, with guest speaker Joe Rogers.
WHO: Our Own Voice Ensemble, directed by Bill Baker.
WHEN: Play begins at 9 a.m. Saturday.
PRICE: $10, includes conference fee and lunch.
SPONSORS: The Mental Health Association of Memphis and Shelby County, VISTA, Paired to Care Program, United Way of Greater Memphis.
FOR INFORMATION CALL: 323-0633

It's the voices. Dozens of shrill voices: Get a job! Fly away! Read the Bible! Stop! A carnival of thoughts clashing in a mad vortex of confusion.

These voices are the premise for Alice's Adventures in… Understand?!, an original drama by Bill Baker that attempts to explain mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and manic depression. "You haven't heard it before so we're telling it in our own voice," the cast tells the audience.

Baker, a Memphis playwright, surprised local theatre patrons and critics with the excellence of his original work Miracle Play about a paranoid schizophrenic, combined issues for Alice from notes, dialog and poems by mental health consumers. He wove their experiences with Lewis Carroll's classic story about a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a world of madness. Baker's 40-minute performance piece, which debuted Wednesday night as the Circuit Playhouse, will be featured at the Consumer Speaks Conference Saturday at Memphis State University, where nationally known consumer advocate Joe Rogers will speak. From there, Baker hopes the troupe will be asked to perform at area schools, hospitals and civic organizations, anywhere, any place to further understanding of mental illness.

Some form of mental illness strikes one of every five Americans, said Mable Hudson, secretary for the Mental Health Association in Memphis. In Tennessee, there are more than 42,000 people with a disabling mental illness, said the Tennessee Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Alice's Adventures in... Understand?! hints of psychodrama yet is not a classic example. Psychodrama is a theatrical process designed to help the actors.

In Alice's variated adventure, it is the audience that should benefit from the performance, walking away with a better understanding of mental illness.

For example, consumers say, there is a misunderstanding that schizophrenics have two personalities. They do not. When they have episodes, they can hear voices and hallucinate.

Unique to the production is its cast, mental health "consumers," or those who consume mental health services. The eight-member ensemble, called Our Own Voice, invites the audience on a journey with Alice, White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat through a frightening world of hospitalization, mania, and Thorazine.

"We are using theater to promote dialog and develop and provide insight," said Baker, whose interest in therapeutic theater stems from his background in therapy and theater.

"Therapeutic theater has been a mission for me," Baker said. "Ten years ago I became dissolutioned with show business, the shallowness of the actors and audiences. There was no real connection between actor and audience."

Baker, a regular on the Memphis avante-garde set in the 1970s, left for Washington and Buffalo, N.Y., where he earned a degree in psychiatric social work and in theater. He is not trained in the formal discipline of psychotherapy, but his experience in theater and therapy led him to that crossroad.

Baker, who is working on his second master's degree in theater at Memphis State University, wrote Alice to teach audiences. The show ultimately will raise more questions than it answers, but Baker says that's OK. He and the troupe want the audience to speak up after the performance.

Mental health consumers appreciate this, and any opportunity, to explain their illnesses. It is a part of their civil rights movement, a 20-year nationwide struggle to eradicate the stigma of mental illness and to help the mentally ill become independent.

"(The rights movement) is evolutionary, another step toward full participation in American culture, part of a continuum," explains Khy Daniel, an actor, consumer, and director of Our House, drop-in center for the mentally ill.

"(Mental illness) has gone from a private joke to a stereotype to Jason (the character in horror movies). Now it's going into recognizing (the mentally ill) as people. I hope it will go into acceptance of the condition people have with this diagnosis."