Laughing Through the Pain : Troupe of the Mentally Ill Uses Comedy to Spread Understanding and Erase Stigmas

Did you hear the one about the mentally ill comic?

He’s no joke.

He is Billy Moody, 44, survivor of Vietnam, heroin addiction and schizophrenia, in that order. Moody is a big thinker: For instance, he used to believe he was Jesus Christ II. The voices told him so.

“Sometimes it (was) pretty hilarious,” Moody remembered. “They said: ‘You will be a great healer. . . . There will be no more sickness, no more mental problems.’ And I was believing them.”

On medication now, Moody no longer considers himself a messiah, but he is still going for miracles. The latest is a doozy: raising public awareness to remove the stigma of mental illness. Laugh if you want--there’s more. He is part of a comedy troupe, the 14th Street Players, in which nearly every performer is mentally ill.

They do skits and improvisation. Sometimes Moody plays an eccentric psychiatrist. Cast members enact scenes from “Dazed of Our Lives” or discuss that new book: “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Psychiatric Medication . . . but Were Too Sedated to Ask.” They go for lunch at Jack In Seclusion. “May I have your disorder, please?” the cashier asks cheerfully. Moody requests the Freud chicken. The cashier inquires again: “Will there be any side effects?”

The yuks go on and on. Off-Broadway theater? Very far off. The players do hospitals, universities and mental health conferences. Patrons are asked to can their sympathy at the door. In their black “Stigma Busters” T-shirts, the actors make a simple point: The mentally ill are just people. They can have fun, tell jokes. They’re not dangerous.

And if you happen to be one--hey, don’t be ashamed. You can put on a smile, try to make something of yourself.

“People look at (the troupe) and say: ‘Oh, they had a little depression, took some Valium, Prozac,’ ” said Carrie Bray, an actress who formed the group 12 years ago at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Westwood. “No. This is schizophrenia. This is bipolar (disorder). These people have been hospitalized; (one has) had electro-shock treatments.

“If they can do it . . . up on that stage, you people out there suffering, you can be like that.”

If it sounds like ready pathos, forget it. That was how the troupe started, trying to act out sober insights into the anguish of mental illness.

That was the first pratfall.

“It was bad,” Bray recalled.

Comedy proved the only way to keep an audience. The troupe was the first of its kind in the nation, Bray said. Its members--about 10 at any given time--have traveled to 33 states, spinning off 22 similar troupes, Bray said.

That is not the real punch line, though. What may be more remarkable, the actors said, is how the Los Angeles troupe has endured. Four members of the original cast are still at it. Moody and several others joined eight or 10 years ago. Together, that core group has kept the gags going despite suicide attempts, funding cuts and enough other crises to wipe a grin off anyone’s face.

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Onstage, the troupe learned to mask their suffering; offstage, they learned to deal with it, at least a little. The group was not intended as therapy, but in comedy, surprise is everything. Cast members found a purpose. They became friends. Not only do they rehearse and perform together, they stay in touch by phone, discussing jokes, hospital wards, whatever.

“Every one of us thinks of the Players as a second family,” said Rowena (Ro) Duron Leist, 41, whose bouts of severe depression may be rooted in a tormented childhood; who says her father once tried to hold her head in an oven. “I can tell any of the Players, or Carrie, anything. It’s kind of like we’re all on call for each other, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

As personal troubles go, Leist is not least. The good news is, those staples in her stomach--the ones that curbed her weight problem--don’t bother her anymore. This year, doctors took out the stomach. Suicide attempts? Leist figures she has racked up 15. But there may be a few others, she said, that were zapped from her memory by the electric shock treatments.

Leist was working at a Pasadena dental lab in 1981. One evening she drove home crying, for no real reason. She went straight to the medicine cabinet. “I took every pill in the house and washed it down with a bottle of booze,” she said. “I thought that was it--it was over.”

That was her entree into the mental health system. She woke up in a psychiatric ward, where she embarked on a failed series of anti-depressant drugs before her doctors hauled out the electrodes.

In those traumatic early months of treatment, Leist was dragged by a friend to a meeting of the new theatrical group at Robertson Recreation Center on the Westside. Leist hid in the back.

“I was going, ‘I don’t want any part of this,’ ” she said. “ ‘There’s no way I’m going to get up in front of people (and act).’ ”

However, no one else emerged as the next Phyllis Diller, or Bill Cosby. The chorus line that inaugural year was something akin to the Personal Horror Revue. Actors included Eleanor Alpert, who at age 4 had begun fearing the household furniture--it seemed to her to move; Ron Marshall, who had leaped out a second-floor window at 14 on the false belief that there was a fire; and Gail Green, who had spent years hearing voices and trying to kill herself.

Along with other performers who came and went later, cast members began learning the disciplines of the stage. Bray had no formal psychiatric training. She had been on the far fringes of the mental health system--the star of “Carrie’s Corner,” a puppet show on public television in Stanislaus County. It taught children about divorce, anger and the like.

Bray’s philosophy was: Troupe members had to see themselves as actors, not mental cases. “You can’t tell the difference when we’re up onstage,” Green said.

Leist remembered that in college she needed four semesters to pass a beginning speech class; every time a speech was due, she would drop out. “I just turned around completely,” she said. “All of a sudden I got put in a show, and I just started doing it. Now, I don’t shut up.”

The Project Return Players, as they were originally known, got funding through the nonprofit Mental Health Assn. of Los Angeles, which began sending them nationwide. The road became an act unto itself.

At a convention in San Francisco, 2,000 psychiatrists gave the troupe a standing ovation. At Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, a teen-age girl told Leist that she had been trying all morning to figure out how to kill herself.

The show had made the girl smile. “That’s pretty monumental,” Leist said.

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Then there were the basic, B-movie types of farce: the time in South Carolina, for example, that Green was bitten by a fire ant. Turned out, she was allergic to fire ants. While she bloated up and collapsed, Bray had to do some fast stigma busting, assuring bystanders that no, this was not some effect of mental illness. Paramedics administered oxygen and epinephrine.

“I almost literally died,” Green said.

And then there was the noisy night getting lost on the back roads of Ohio, singing in the van; or that flight home from Kansas on Halloween night, when the plane kept hitting downdrafts in a thunderstorm, dropping 1,000 feet at a time--or so it seemed.

All the travel and rehearsals paid off, though. The troupe was featured on Cable News Network. A documentary was filmed. A sound engineer on the video, Eames Demetrios, later made a feature-length film of his own--”The Giving”--dealing with mental illness and the homeless.

It screened at film festivals in Houston, Chicago and Egypt before showing in a limited release in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Important roles in the art film were played by Alpert, Green and Moody, who auditioned alongside actors who were not mentally ill.

“They carried the story,” Demetrios said of the troupe. “They brought a lot of different qualities and life experiences to the film, and they also delivered as performers.”

Warren Adams, president of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, discovered the troupe in the mid-1980s while flipping channels on public television. He brought Leist and Bray to his own hometown, Des Moines, Iowa, to launch the Central Iowa Players.

“The National Alliance thinks this is a very important component (in) what we’re trying to do to educate the people,” said Adams, whose son Mitchell was found to be mentally ill in 1986. Mitchell still performs with the Central Iowa Players when not tutoring university physics students.

Members of the Los Angeles cast made halting progress toward better lives. Green and Marshall, who had been living in board-and-care homes, eventually got their own apartments, at Bray’s urging. Green became less suicidal. Her closest call since joining the Players occurred six years ago, Bray said, when she put a shotgun in her mouth, then changed her mind and checked herself into the hospital.

Her new medication can cause leukemia, so Green takes a blood test every week. But the voices have stopped. She now jokes about being lonely.

Moody had lost a guard job when his schizophrenia took hold; he kept giving away merchandise and removing the bullets from his gun. But, with treatment, he found other work, married and is now raising two sons. Joining the Players 10 years ago furthered his progress.

“Coming out of the mental-health system, I had a reluctance to trust other people,” said Moody, who now does casework for the Mental Health Assn. in Long Beach. “It has allowed me to trust . . . to come out of a shell.”

Alpert never left her board-and-care home. She is still too terrified.

Leist became Bray’s assistant, handling travel logistics and budgeting. For a while, she also left messages on Bray’s answering machine: She had taken the pills, she was ending it all. Love, Ro.

“And I’d have to call the paramedics,” Bray said. That happened four or five times, she said, and in the late ‘80s Leist went through a second series of electric shock treatments. Her stomach-stapling operation came in 1990.

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Except for the health problems, Leist was actually improving. Then, wham. In 1992, the Players found out that their funding--all $65,000 a year--was doing a Houdini. The troupe had become one more target of far-reaching budget reductions in mental health.

Leist went right back into the hospital. The Players were angry, depressed and directionless, all at once. Bray’s salary was gone. There was no more travel money.

The nature of improv, however, is tackling the unexpected. Bray and her cast members decided to stay together, to laugh it off.

Although the road trips have stopped and performances are less frequent, the show goes on. The troupe renamed itself after 14th Street in Oakland, where Bray grew up doing childhood theater. At the Players’ most recent rehearsal, actress Valerie Harper showed up. Harper is planning a TV movie about the cast.

Meanwhile, Bray spends a few hundred a month from her own pocket and tries to line up grants. Last spring, she was maid of honor at Leist’s wedding. After getting out of the hospital, Leist married a truck driver. The whole cast had a party for her a few months afterward.

“Amazingly enough, she’s never missed a show or a workshop,” Bray said of Leist, “unless she was in the hospital. That became her lifeline to society--our group. Laughter is the best medicine.”