Acting Out the Miracle of Mary Barnes : For the real Mary Barnes, and the actress who plays her, acting out schizophrenia and its cure is its own kind of therapy.

Thirty years ago, Mary Barnes went crazy. Two weeks ago, she watched actress Laurie O’Brien walk onstage as the character Mary Barnes--and saw herself go crazy all over again.

“It brings it back,” admits the English-born artist and children’s author, whose triumphant battle over schizophrenia is the subject of David Edgar’s “Mary Barnes” at the Odyssey Theatre. Artistic director Ron Sossi originally staged the drama (adapted from the book “Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness,” by Barnes and her former therapist, Joseph Berke) in 1982-83. Now he has revived the production for the theater’s 25th anniversary--once again starring O’Brien as the tortured young Mary.

Although suffering with arthritis, Barnes, 72, traveled from Scotland (as did the London-based Berke, 56) for the play’s premiere, and was palpably moved by the performance. On opening night, Barnes sat upright in her wheelchair on the aisle of the front row, eyes twinkling, smiling broadly. Onstage, the cast of 13 re-created the five years Barnes lived in London’s Kingsley Hall under the care of controversial psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who housed patients and doctors together in a free-form, experimental healing process.

“Watching Laurie, I had all sorts of feelings,” Barnes confesses the day after the performance, sitting in the Odyssey lobby, which is decorated with her sunny artwork. “You feel as you did feel at that time. Laurie, as she plays it, goes through the explosions of anger, all of that. It’s extremely real and true. And I am also living through it again, although not in a harmful way at all. It has a very releasing, therapeutic effect. But you see, that’s the basis of all therapy, isn’t it? You go backward to go forward.”

One might say the same of O’Brien’s return to this play.

The first time around, she won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and an L.A. Weekly Award for her role. Since then, she has appeared in a number of other acclaimed stage roles and has worked regularly in film and TV. Yet it’s “Mary Barnes” that everyone remembers. Strangers still stop the actress in public and tell her that this play changed their lives.

“People might ask, ‘Why do you want to do it?’ ” concedes O’Brien, 44. “Certainly it isn’t to prove I can do it, or to get attention. My career is fine, I’m earning my living. So why am I going to do it again?”

One of the reasons hits close to home: “My sister-in-law died in a mental hospital; they overdosed her on Thorazine. So every time this play is done it’s a statement for courage and looking at the other reality--and doing it without drugs.”

Yet, she adds, the ongoing dialogue in the psychiatric community about mental illness--to drug or not to drug--is not whitewashed in the story’s presentation.

“Even R.D. Laing, at the end of his life, said that drugs may be helpful in some instances,” O’Brien acknowledges. “Mental illness is not black and white; there are biochemical things going on. I think there’s probably a middle line: therapy with minor amounts of drugs. But that’s me--I sway away from drugs. For other people it might not be so simple. Mary was certainly a rare, unique situation.”

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Even the first time around, O’Brien brought a special intuition to the role. The Colorado native put herself through the University of Colorado working with asthmatic children at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital; she also worked in a mental hospital and in juvenile detention centers. Juggling her “other” life as an actress, O’Brien received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in what she calls “Reader’s Theater,” an emotionally therapeutic program she developed within the university’s theater, literature and psychology departments.

In 1981, she came to Los Angeles. “I was getting caught there, and also very exhausted from working in the institutions,” she explains. “Mary would understand that. It wasn’t the people. It was the institution that was so draining, and I was finding myself clinically depressed. I knew I had to escape.”

One of the promises she made to herself upon leaving was to someday tell the story of the troubled people she’d worked with. “And so when I got this role,” she says simply, “that was the gift, the conduit.”

Actually, when she was first offered the part, O’Brien turned it down, explaining to Sossi that she was uncomfortable with a dramatic sequence in which the demented Mary is seen nude, covered with her own excrement. “After I accepted the role, I said to Ron, ‘You know, I’m not afraid of the nude scene--I’m afraid of the schizophrenia.’ And he said, ‘Of course you are.’ ” O’Brien sighs. “It is the most frightening thing a human being can face,” she says, voicing the primal dread--and vulnerability--that the play exposes: “The terror of losing your mind.”

And yet with each performance, she must venture to that place--what Mary refers to in the play as “going down” to the core of her being, meeting the pain head-on. “I used to be a swimmer,” notes O’Brien, who is married to actor Carl Weintraub and has a son, Cory, 5. “And I’d get upset before the races because I knew that once I dive into something, I would do my best. If I was going to do this role, I was going to do it completely. It is not a part that you walk through.” Yet away from the theater, she says, “I do my life, and I do it very well.”

The actress shrugs. “Because I’m doing this play, I think I’m so much saner--I’m probably the sanest person in Los Angeles! Because every night I go down there to something that is in everyone. And I also have my life: My son who needs me to come out and be with him. And so I am guaranteed nightly to go down--and to come back; because of my love for my son, I will always be there. And I get to stand up and say, ‘I’m Mary Barnes. I’m clean and free.’ ”

And different than she was. “I’ve got 12 years of experience,” O’Brien says. “So it’s been a rare opportunity to take a performance I thought was honest and pretty good--and take it a step further. In the second act, the turmoil is much more primitive; I found an animal part of myself, a guttural part, that wasn’t quite there before.”

Playing the role to the real Mary Barnes was one more step.

“I’ve grown quite accustomed to seeing her sitting there,” O’Brien says cheerfully, referring to the four performances Barnes had attended that week. “After all those weeks of rehearsal, when the audience finally arrived and Mary arrived, it was like an electrical connection. It’s not like I hear her--it’s more that I feel her around me. In the scene where I’m stealing food, I can practically hear Mary’s voice. I also dream a lot about her. It began in rehearsals; she was just present inside me. Her spirit. And it’s comforting.”

The actress smiles ruefully. “It’s not as weird as it sounds.”

* “Mary Barnes,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees next Sunday and May 7, 2 p.m. Ends May 14. $17.50-$21.50; student rush, $12. (310) 477-2055.