Refracted Light brings adolescent mental health out of the shadows

Sending your kid off to college can be emotionally draining under the best of circumstances. But when your child has a diagnosed mental health condition, the anxiety can be off the charts. That’s the situation faced by Lucy and Ted Harris, the parents at the center of Dana Hall’s new drama Refracted Light, now in a world premiere (directed by Natividad Salgado) with Eclectic Full Contact Theatre.

Daughter Penny (Jamie Lee) is 18 and about to head off to a prestigious undergraduate creative writing program. But she struggles with the belief that her meds for her bipolar disorder are limiting her creativity, as well as with her desire to break away from the overprotective instincts exhibited by Lucy (Jessica Lauren Fisher) in particular. Ted (Zach Kunde) tries to mediate, and Penny’s therapist, Dr. David Daker (Charles Schoenherr) offers encouragement. But it’s the arrival of Lucy’s younger sister, Becky (Kim Wilson Buck), that really sets off the fireworks.

Refracted Light
Through 9/27: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, eclectic-theatre.com, $30-$35

Becky—played beautifully by Wilson Buck, a former Reader theater critic— is also an artist (she has worked for years as an actor with a traveling company) and is also bipolar. Her talks with Penny (particularly a lovely encounter at the top of the town water tower, where Penny has run off after another argument with her mom) reveals that she understands what it feels like when some of the colors in your world are muted by the medicine that lets you function in that world. (A line about how bipolar disorder can make you feel “like a passenger in your own body” is particularly cogent.)

Hall’s play is earnest and often funny, but it does tend to overstate its points a few times, which flattens out the dramatic insights. In particular, until near the end, Fisher’s Lucy is stuck with being in the repetitive and reactive mode of overanxious caregiver, which while undoubtedly true to the situation, doesn’t give the character as much room for nuance as she deserves. (Particularly since Kunde’s Ted gets the sympathetic comic-relief guy bits.) But Refracted Light deserves praise for tackling the issue of raising kids with mental health issues. And it made me quite glad that Illinois is the first state in the nation to require universal mental health screenings for public school students. Parents like Lucy and Ted shouldn’t have to go it alone.