CRAZY FRUITCAKES

Crazy Fruitcakes is a heartfelt and comedic piece of musical theater that examines the mental health profession in modern society.  It takes place at a Bellevue-like asylum in Manhattan.  The patients display clear mental health disorders — Shakespeare has OCD that presents as the relentless rhyming of this speech, Tallulah has Borderline Personality Disorder, Julia has PTSD from repressed sexual violations, Malcolm has rage from the loss of his son, and Angel is dissociative — but the sickest people on the ward are actually the head nurse Stoneheart, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the doctor Shamas, a man so disappointed by his life and cocaine addicted that he suffers a psychotic break.  Patients and staff alike undergo miraculous healing transformations, not via their go-to diagnoses, drugs, and outdated protocols, but through their acceptance of themselves just as they are.

OUT OF MY MIND

Out Of My Mind is a piece of musical theater that examines the intimate, dynamic, and mutually informative relationship between life and death. Afflicted with a brain tumor, its protagonist, Bee Bernhardt, succumbs to despair, but over the course of a healing journey replete with both episodes of mania and depression, she awakens to a more meaningful version of her life. The people in Bee’s life — her 17-year-old daughter, Bo, her deceased husband, Seymour, her boyfriend, Fred, and Bo’s first girlfriend, Sophia — are all affected, their lives changing as well.

Patricia Stamm