Lights Up On...Elizabeth Kenny & Sick at New City Theater

Within minutes of beginning this interview, it became clear that Elizabeth Kenny is a natural storyteller. Not long after the pleasantries had been exchanged, Kenny quickly enthralled as she broadly painted a sketch of the escalating mysteries surrounding the beginning of her story. Sick, Kenny's solo performance piece which premieres this Friday at New City Theater, is alternately a recounting of her experiences during the early part of the 21st century, an exploration of the market driven institutional details drug companies undertake while developing their products and how they're regulated, and a subjective recreation of the skewed perspective induced while under the influence of the medications she was prescribed.

Toward the end of our conversation, Kenny wanted to make something clear: "People get the impression that I'm out to attack the pharmaceutical companies, and I'm not. I know they do good work, and there are people for whom the medications are incredibly helpful. I just think it's criminal that, because the connotations are so negative commercially speaking, the more questionable aspects of Big Pharma are kept hidden."

Seattlest spoke with Kenny about the project, the decision to go solo, and how the early works of the late monologuist Spalding Gray helped to shape her piece.

Seattlest: How would you categorize Sick? Is it a message piece with a moral? A cautionary tale? A slice of life?

Elizabeth Kenny: It's a lot of different things...

S: Okay, let's go back a bit then. What was the impetus behind wanting to tell this story?

EK: It all started in 2001 when I went to a doctor to treat ovarian cysts, which had been an ongoing concern. I had resisted going in because I knew they were going to prescribe birth control pills, and I did not want to go back on them. I didn't feel like me when I was on them.

When the pain got to appendicitis levels of intense, I went to see my gynecologist. After listening to my reservations about taking birth control pills, and determining that it had been a while since I'd been on them, she suggested that I go on one of the new types of b.c., that these were different than what I was used to, and then prescribed one of them.

I went on the pill, and within a week I started feeling debilitatingly depressed, it was bad. I mean, while I had many issues going on at the time, that wasn't one of them. I go back to the gynecologist and explain what's going on. She was mystified because while there were reports of people becoming irritated, this kind of depression wasn't common.

So, she recommends a psychiatrist. And that began what became a two and a half year cycle of visiting the doctor and then having strange things happening to my body. My family would come out from the east coast to support me, and things just kept getting worse and worse -- including hospitalization, going on anti-psychotics -- until I came out of the other side in 2004.

S: Why do it solo?

EK: Well, it took me a couple of years to decide that this was a story I wanted to tell. Then it took some more time to figure out I wanted to ask: "How the hell does this happen? How can these good, educated, qualified and modern doctors and scientists be so lost that I end up losing three years of my life as a result?" Then I went about collecting information about anti-depressants, how pharmaceutical companies developed the process of creating and testing these medications, going as far back as Prozac and moving forward from there.

While I was doing that, I started thinking that a solo piece was the best way to tell the story, and because I happen to be an actor, it seemed to fit. I'm not the biggest fan of memoir pieces in general, so there's a bit of irony in the decision. I was leery, but once I realized that I wouldn't have such a problem if someone else had written the story, I quickly got over my objections.

S: Did you find ways to avoid the trappings of a memoir piece?

EK: Eventually. When I started developing the piece, I was working with John Kazanjian--

S: You'd worked with him before [most notably in a 2004 production of Neil LaBute's Bash at New City Theater, where Kanzanjian is Artistic Director - ed]

EK: A few times, yeah. One day after working on a piece, he said "I just think it's more interesting when you tell me about the crazy things that happened to you."

John brings a lot to the table, he started sharing his experience of watching Spalding Gray's early work, and talking about Gray's experiments with chance operation, which is this poetic way of creating text, ways of telling a story that is independent of what the writer wants to say.

I found that the operation techniques allowed me to address the many different aspects of this story that I wanted to tell. Parts of it feel like a love story between my mom and I, other parts feel like a conspiracy story about pharmaceutical companies and how they work. It was a way to cover all of that while keeping the overall piece on track.

S: How does Tina Rowley fit into all of this, is she part of the game mechanism?

EK: We call Tina my accompanist. She keeps time and conducts the flow of the evening. Because, while I wanted to cover all of these topics and aspects, I also wanted to convey some of what it's like to be under the influence of all of these medications. Try to paint what it's like to live in a state of perpetual mood shifts and being hyper-detailed or somewhat fuzzy. From elated to angry and back.

I'm trying to create something spontaneous each night, and writing it all down and rehearsing it in the traditional manner would kill that. At the same time, it isn't improvised, I spent a year developing this material. What Tina does is help me craft the piece each night, based on her in-the-moment impression of whether she thinks I have covered a topic enough or not enough, and so on.

As a consequence, it's being composed on its feet. That danger, the risk this presents is part of the thrill and challenge of it all for me.

Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m., thourgh April 30 // New City Theater's Shoebox, 1404 18th Avenue // $20 in advance - $25 at the door