Four teens are stuck in a row of chairs outside of the principal’s office. One’s a former popular drama queen, one’s an angsty emo kid, one’s a quiet boy, and one’s an anxious girl who’s the top of her class.
It sounds familiar. Yes, it brings me back to the good old days of high school when everyone was a stereotype. The good old days when life resembled The Breakfast Club.
Except it’s not quite that.
Theatre University of New Brunswick’s latest show, Black Dog: 4 vs. the Wrld dives into mental illness in teenagers. One’s a semi-alcoholic. Another cuts himself. Another purges herself. Another sees and hears things. Despite some initial resistance, they decide to form a club, mostly because they don’t have anyone else to relate to.
All of the teens are nicknamed after numbers. It suggests they don’t feel strong enough to have their own name. It’s only by the end, they ask about the others’ names. They realize they aren’t just a number, at least to this regtag group.
One of the teens, Two is haunted by a black dog that was drawn dozens of times in her dead brother’s notebook. The same brother who jumped off a cliff a couple months ago and allegedly killed himself.
It’s this black dog that will come back to haunt all of them as they struggle through the crushing feeling of being alone and of being a mentally ill teenager.
Black Dog: 4 vs. the wrld was written by a former University of New Brunswick master’s of creative writing graduate so UNB already has a deeper connection to this play than most. Directed by UNB’s director of drama, Len Falkenstein, Fredericton’s omnipresent theatre guru, and acted by third-year and fourth-year students, the play is an interesting yet slightly cringe-worthy throwback to high school and the misfit theme.
Maybe I would relate more if I was still in high school.
Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t like moody teenagers, don’t go see this play. It shows some of the most condensed angst that I’ve seen in years; maybe even since I left high school. But that occasional nihilism can be a characteristic of mental illness. They had the right to put that in there.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. The central characters are often mean to each other.
The teens still whisper behind other people’s backs and call people “freaks.”
And one character makes several references to the suicide victim as a “crazy” person.
It might not have been the best fit to place opening day on Bell Let’s Talk Day, a mental illness awareness campaign administered by Canadian telecommunications company Bell.
On that day, the company encourages others to shun behaviours and words like “crazy” and “freak.” They campaign for starting the conversation on mental health, not hiding behind misleading euphemisms, or using derogatory labels.
But teenagers can be cruel. And this play is a depiction of perhaps a vision of the playwright’s high school in the late 90s and early 2000s. Thankfully now, most are more aware of the comments they make about mental illness.
On the other hand, one of the highlights of Black Dog was the multimedia experience, spearheaded by technical director Mike Johnston. Live-tweets were posted during the show as part of the experience. Edited videos created dream-like montages or flashbacks.
The play went beyond the stage. The actors moved back and forth from the audience to the stage and created an experience that taught the audience something. Mental illness goes beyond just the stage.
I wasn’t satisfied with the ending; it felt unresolved. But that may have been the whole point. Mental illness is a part of life and that doesn’t mean one can or should stop living. Instead, they should live life as fully as they can with the friends and support systems available to them.
Being a teenager is hard. It’s even more difficult with mental illness. The best we can do is not follow the examples of these teens, be kind and listen.
The show opened on Jan. 30 and runs until Feb. 2 with showings at 7:30 p.m. at the University of New Brunswick’s Memorial Hall.