AVOIDABLE MADNESS

There’s a show running right now at a smaller venue of a state-of-the-art West Side arts complex.   It’s a foreign import, a one-woman show that, in a different format as Ruby Wax: Losing It, has spent years touring asylums with its garbled message of exculpatory hope for those suffering mental illness.   Because the show’s author/performer has experienced what (based on her unstructured description) sounds like a nervous breakdown triggered by depression: and because she enjoys a measure of celebrity in the UK: and because her personal courage and admirable motives combine to make this show an honorable thing to promote:   her show made it to the Broad.   On opening night it played to a very small house, and so it well might, because for all its good intentions it is not a good show.

I endured an extremely brief institutionalization for emotional breakdown when I was 16; I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the depression that put me there.   But if this show had invaded my asylum during the scant hours of my residence, it wouldn’t have made me feel better.   It would have made me cry harder because it would have been more evidence that even the compassionate were helpless to assist me.

Billed at 90 minutes and running less than 60, Ruby Wax: Out of Her Mind offers a scattered, trite, lowbrow ramble through the personal and scientific phenomena of psychiatric disability (perhaps the Q&A unattended by this reviewer accounts for the extra 30 minutes).   Largely a showcase for Ms. Wax’s stand-up stylings, the show is hampered equally by weak writing (obvious jokes, lack of structure), self-congratulatory delivery, and absence of apparent direction – no programs were available at opening night, and no director credited on the projected pre-show supertitles over Ms. Wax’s head.   It’s very much on par with British situation comedy writing and acting, which makes sense given Ms. Wax’s pedigree; the idiom in which one has found success is one that sometimes does not translate across ponds.   The show seeks to destigmatize and legitimate psychiatric disorders, and that’s an important and valuable pursuit.   Out of Her Mind may have done much to lift someone’s spirits, somewhere.   It may have educated a person with a big-ticket disposable income and an astonishing lack of social awareness.   So there’s no shame in this poorly-executed show, but it does raise questions.

One question is whether the expanded cabaret version of this show, which co-starred Judith Owen and played well at the Edinburgh Fringe and The Menier Chocolate Factory in London, is what the Broad ordered when it invited Ms. Wax for a week’s residency; whether it declined to loan her a pianist and a piano, or knew what it was getting, or what.   Another is why they thought any version of this show was sophisticated enough for a $50-a-ticket audience.   But my biggest question is why venues keep allowing mediocre material to take stage merely on the strength of laudable impulses that may have spawned it.

Ruby Wax: Out of Her Mind
The Edye @ The Broad Stage in Santa Monica
scheduled to end on February 3, 2013
for tickets, call 310.434.3200 or visit http://www.TheBroadStage.com