Elizabeth Kenny’s toxic medical nightmare makes compelling theater | Arts & Culture

Elizabeth Kenny had a horrible experience, over several years, when she was given medication for bursting ovarian cysts and had a drug reaction her OB-GYN didn’t recognize as a drug reaction.

Elizabeth’s doctor suggested it was “in her head” and Elizabeth needed psychological help. That led to anti-depressants, which led to voices in her head, which led to anti-psychotic meds, which led to suicidal and homicidal ideation. Finally, after her life totally fell apart, she was detox’ed off the medications and recovered.

If you were to sit in a coffee shop and listen to her tell her story, you’d probably have your mouth open in shock for a lot of it!

An experienced solo performer in the Seattle theater community, Elizabeth wanted to tell the story on stage. She tells KOMO Communities about the process of developing the piece you can now see her perform at New City Theater, called Sick.

“I’m a good storyteller in my life; it’s the way I relate to people,” Elizabeth says. “We very conscientiously tried to keep it like the way I would tell it if I met you in a coffee shop. The spontaneity and intimacy of that kind of talking is what we were after in creating the play.”

Elizabeth performs the story in pieces by using trigger words on cards. Tina Rowley, her friend and fellow theater performer, sits at the side of the stage and reads a word. Tina also dings a bell when Tina thinks Elizabeth should move on.

Elizabeth says she started out trying to make a more conventional theater piece. “Originally we set out to make a documentary theater piece. I interviewed a lot of the doctors who were my caretakers for their take on how things unfolded. Also, some of my friends and family and how they perceived what was happening. And I interviewed some drug reps.

“I tried to construct the piece with all those characters present, but it didn’t come alive in any way that was interesting. We discarded that and what was left was the story I had brought into the room.

“I would tell John (Kazanjian, artist director of New City Theater and her director/collaborator) stories and we developed note cards, 150 to 170 of them. We started to play around with Spaulding Gray’s work and his use of chance operation and time pressure and what that would feel like….

“...if each time you told the story, you couldn’t finish the story because a bell rang and you had to start telling a different story. In the rules of process, you wouldn’t be allowed to complete that story and would have to move on. Then we started thinking of it as the way to perform the piece.

“What’s in the play now are about 40 different incidents. The cards are not pulled randomly and it is chronological. Often I tell the same story for that word, but there are times that I will tell part of a story that Tina has never heard before. Both of those ways work well together and it’s what I like about this process.”

Elizabeth has been performing this intimate piece in the small New City Theater for about a week now. She says that during rehearsal, she and John had gotten a little “immune” to the stories. Now, “Experiencing them with an audience I remember that some of this stuff is hard to hear. I want to be aware of how people are receiving it and stay present.”

The energy in the room, with an audience, “makes it really easy to start again when the bell stops me,” Elizabeth says. “Sometimes I want the bell to come in earlier, or I don’t want to stop telling the story. It’s another opportunity each time the bell rings.”

Tina’s role as the bell-ringer is a subtle, but important contribution. Elizabeth says, “It’s the part of the play that is learning as we do it. It’s the hardest part to rehearse. She’s really composing with me.

“What she’s listening for or sensing, each night, it’s like editing the film. You have the footage and each night she’s editing the film again in real time. She has to consider the quality and content of what I’m saying, how I’m saying it differently from the night before.

“She has to listen to each episode as it’s occurring and what the cumulative effect is. That’s fascinating to me. The more we perform it, the more fascinated I get with her job and the more responsibility I understand that she has.”

Elizabeth has never told such a personal story in a theater piece before, but the story about Big Pharma, the “medical-industrial complex,” as she terms it, and how even doctors are convinced to feel like they need to prescribe powerful, expensive drugs, is one she cares about. “It’s the relationship between patients and doctors and the issue of toxicity that are very strong motivators to telling the story.”

Elizabeth is really happy with the response she’s getting to the evening. “It’s been intense and very gratifying. Part of what was painful during the experience was that it was completely misunderstood by people that knew me well. I’d have to explain it over and over and over again. This process is making me feel like people are getting what happened. I’m feeling understood and that’s a very powerful thing.”

For tickets, go to www.shadylaneproductions.org/sick/.