Happy Place runs Oct. 20-29 at the Firehall Arts Centre, 280 E. Cordova St., Vancouver. Tickets: $20-$33 at tickets.firehallartscentre.ca or 604-689-0926.
It’s a story about depression, but that doesn’t mean it’s depressing.
That’s a message Toronto-based actress and writer Pamela Mala Sinha wants to relay about her play, Happy Place, which follows a group of women staying at an in-patient care facility who have all attempted suicide.
“Depression is the organizing principle of the piece, but it’s not the point of the piece,” Sinha says. “The piece is about these seven women in this particular given circumstance and their impact on each other.”
Presented by Touchstone Theatre in association with Ruby Slippers Theatre and Diwali in B.C., Happy Place makes its Vancouver debut Oct. 20-29 at the Firehall Arts Centre. Roy Surette directs the all-female cast, which includes North Shore talents Nicola Cavendish, Colleen Wheeler and Donna Yamamoto.
Despite the dark premise, the story is full of silver linings.
“I can say without hesitation that it’s about love. It has compassion, it has humour. It has difficult subject matter, but not handled in a heavy handed way,” Sinha says, explaining the laughs come from the frankness of the whole situation.
“I believe the best kind of humour comes from truth, and this is a very truthful place. There is no bullshit in this place. People say what they think and what they feel, and sometimes to the great detriment of others,” she notes. “They are saying – not only to each other but to themselves – what is unsayable outside those walls.”
The idea for Happy Place came to Sinha while she was writing her debut play Crash, a one-woman show, in which she performs, based on her personal experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual assault, and the death of her father. Crash received widespread critical acclaim (it won four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance) and finished up an off-Broadway run in New York this past summer. But the work focuses on Sinha’s own experiences and she longed to share the stories of the many other women she met, and who impacted her profoundly, during that difficult time in her life. She’s also all too familiar with the dearth of good roles for actresses over 40 and wanted to create parts for women at the peak of their game. Five of the seven characters are 45 and older, she notes with pride.
In her writing of Happy Place, Sinha says she used the hospital setting as a “microcosm of the world outside.” There are many faces of depression and many people struggle in silence. She particularly hopes to draw attention to the unfortunate “hierarchy of suffering” that validates one person’s grief over another’s.
Sinha has been acting for the stage and screen for nearly three decades and performed in the 2015 Toronto premiere of Happy Place. She will be watching the Vancouver production from the audience, though – her first time not acting in a staging of her work.
While she can’t know how the audience will react to her play, Sinha hopes presenting her characters might cause viewers to recognize themselves or a loved one and leave the theatre with a better understanding of the cross-section of depression.
“I’m just an artist who’s offering up the human experience and hoping it will be recognized as truthful and resonant to the people who are witnessing it.”
Sinha is currently at work on a movie adaptation of Happy Place with Toronto-based Sienna Films. Directed by Helen Shaver, the production is slated to start filming in early 2018.
