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JD Derbyshire’s one-person show

Photo by Ben Laird

Gateway show explores mental health struggles, stigma

By Hannah Scott, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

Published 2:36 PST, Fri February 25, 2022

Last Updated: 3:53 PST, Fri February 25, 2022

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JD Derbyshire’s new one-person play Certified asks audiences to contemplate the challenges of mental health struggles.

Opening March 8 at Gateway Theatre, the show turns the audience into a mental health review board to assess Derbyshire’s sanity.

“I can’t think of a group better suited (for the task) than those who still go to live theatre,” they say.

Derbyshire, who works as a playwright, performer, and comedian, was part of the mental health system for four or five years. They want the show to help educate people about the system’s limits.

“Mental illness is a very individual experience and not a solid state. It’s often portrayed as if you have a mental illness it can mean certain things about your life, and I wanted to show someone actually living with it in a successful way. I like to say your life is different—it might not look like you thought it was going to look—but it’s certainly not over,” says Derbyshire.

The show was initially scheduled for Gateway’s 2020-2021 season, but was postponed due to the pandemic. And in some ways, the postponement opened up a timely conversation about mental health struggles exacerbated by the pandemic itself.

“While the mental health system can offer certain things, it was backed up before COVID, and now we’re really seeing the gaps,” they say. “The mental health system will address crisis situations; often you’re hospitalized and then medicated and then on your own. (Certified) is super timely because it’s a personal story, my personal story, but it’s also a story that I hope opens people up to telling their own stories in different ways.”

Derbyshire wants to break the stigma around mental health struggles, saying it’s important to not only talk about things like depression and anxiety but also accept them with honesty.

“There are lots of ways that we can empower ourselves to accept and make the best use of what we have. We have become so limited in what we think normal human capacity for emotion is that a lot of what we’re experiencing, especially right now, is just what it is to be human,” they say.

“I don’t think this divide we have between who are the crazy people and who aren’t is very useful in life. I think it’s more like this is a really wild ride we’re on and especially right now when we’re living with so much ambiguous loss—COVID, climate change—we’re all going to have to be a little more honest with ourselves and others about our emotional lives. What we may have been able to do before, we’re just not going to be able to do (now).”

Derbyshire is excited to bring Certified to Richmond audiences after its tour was also cancelled due to COVID. They say when they realized the show was imminent, they felt a lift in spirits “that I don’t know if it could have come any other way.”

The show offers a less restrictive theatre environment where patrons can move in and out of the room freely, laugh as loudly as they want, and fidget as needed. A “chill-out” zone in the main lobby is also available for those who need it.

“You’ll see a practice of ‘trigger warnings’ in art. The truth is you can know some of your triggers but you can’t know all of them. I really believe in self-awareness with my mental health and I want to extend that idea to an audience,” says Derbyshire. “Theatre is just one system where you have these rules, you’re supposed to come in and watch a show and sit. I want to make it so that if something comes up and you have to take care of yourself for some reason, you can do that. For me, every single show in theatre should be relaxed. It’s such a prohibitive agreement on so many levels.”

While the “talkback” sessions usually offered after each performance are not possible during the pandemic, Derbyshire says they may be able to put together some kind of virtual gathering.

Certified runs from March 8 to 20. For more information or to buy tickets, click here.