New York-People packed into the Kraine Theater, wet from wind and rain that turned umbrellas inside out and made soggy a fashion statement. What lured them from their cozy houses? A funny play about depression.
Taking a different approach to the trend of tell-all struggles with mental illness, popularized by Mike Wallace, Brooke Shields and others, Drew Wininger focused on the humor that is often overlooked in such confessions. Twelve years of therapy, seven shrinks, countless missed opportunities and one attempted suicide...no punch line needed.
Clinical Depression the Funny Kind, a play written and performed by Wininger, was part of the second annual Frigid Festival in New York which crammed 150 theater performances into 12 days. Wininger's play, an hour-long postmodern pastiche of satire and self-help, developed from writing he'd done during the darker moments of his depression.
As the lights dimmed, a photomontage of Wininger's childhood days played across a screen. In a voiceover, Wininger told the audience that he was a happy, popular, normal kid with great hair who "was never in the popular crowd but was invited to all the parties." And then one day, "I came home from school, went into my garage, put a leather jump rope around my neck and tried to kill myself," he said.
Fortunately, it went no further than the thought, but male suicide is no joke. Beginning in adolescence, men are four times more likely than women to take their own lives according to the Mayo Clinic. Statistics from the World Health Organization estimate that 121 million people suffer from mental illness worldwide. Yet depression, characterized by feelings of isolation and immobility, is not generally talk for the dinner table, let alone a comedy club.
Wininger succeeded in making a difficult subject humorous without trivializing the seriousness of the disease. At 29, wearing khakis and a black button down shirt, Wininger does not come across as a comedian in first blush. More academic than joker, he used understated sarcasm to his benefit.
He talked about his first therapy session, "Like the first time you have sex, really awkward, not that good, but you think it was supposed to be," Wininger said. At one point he asked the audience, "Does anyone here take an antidepressant?" When no one raised their hands, Wininger said, "Well I take three."
"I try to have humor in everything. Granted, it's not funny when you're going through it. I'm definitely not making fun of people hurting," Wininger said in an interview after the show.
Like many young people, Wininger said that he had emotional ups and downs in high school. When he was 16, his grades started to slip and he began sleeping more, unable to get up some days. "Everyone just thought I was lazy," he said.
It was a breakup with a girlfriend that led him to attempt suicide.
"I told my girlfriend who must have told a counselor who then called my parents," he said. "I tried group therapy, but that didn't work because everyone was so messed up," he said with a smirk.
By all account Hollywood has embraced depression too. Wininger noted how shows like the "Sopranos" and "Treatment" addressed the issue of male depression. Yet in spite of its seeming ubiquity, depression remains a taboo topic.
"I go to therapy once a week but I still have a hard time telling my friends that's where I am," Wininger said.
Kristin Schnoor, a graduate student in New York University's school of social work, said that she found the show entertaining and informative for some who didn't know anything about depression.
Schnoor, a counselor at a center for psychoanalysis in New York, said that she sees a lot of young men who initially come in for problems with anxiety.
"I start asking questions and they say, ‘Actually I have been sleeping all day, and I have been crying a lot', and they find out that they're clinically depressed. But I think that they feel there is less of a stigma with anxiety," she said.
Wininger tried to tap into the universality of personal struggles. "Everyone is dealing with something. For the good and the bad, depression is who I am," he told the audience in closing.
For Wininger, one of the most important parts of the show was that he saw a project through and got it up on stage. "Someone commented to me after the show that it was really important for everyone to know that I was going to be okay in the end," Wininger said.