JD Derbyshire turns their real-life experiences with the mental-health system into an interactive theatre piece
In Certified, audience members make up a review board tasked with determining the solo character’s sanity
JD Derbyshire in Certified. Photo by Ben Laird.
Gateway Theatre presents Certified from March 8 to 20. Pay What You Will Preview is on March 8 at 2 pm; opening is on March 9 at 8 pm.
JD DERBYSHIRE is a comedian, playwright, performer, and parent who also happens to be certified insane. Certified, a “fictitious memoir”, is their one-person play exploring their experiences with the mental-health system. An interactive theatre experience, it has the kind of humour, nuance, and heartache that Derbyshire feels is typically lacking in so many conversations about sanity, insanity, and mental well-being.
“I think that the way that mental illness is portrayed in the media and in theatre is as a solidly tragic state that never really ebbs and flows,” Derbyshire tells Stir. “This play is based on real things that happened, but I also took a lot of poetic license in how I describe things because I wanted everyone to be empowered to understand that mental illness is an individual experience and that a diagnosis is not a person’s story.
“Psychiatry is good at helping a mind in crisis, but we have to empower each other to learn how to live well long after the crisis,” they add. “I wanted to put the audience in an interactive position…and keep that question alive with people: What is that we call insanity and what is it that we call sanity?”
Audiences are endowed as a mental-health review board that must determine the solo character’s insanity by the end of the show.
Since its premiere at the Vancouver Fringe Festival in 2016, Certified has travelled across the country, going on to win two Jessie Richardson Awards for Outstanding Script and Critics’ Choice Innovation Award for its 2019 production at Touchstone Theatre. When it comes to the Gateway Theatre—which is operating at 50-percent capacity and adjusted seats to be booked in singles or pairs, meaning seats immediately in front, behind, and either side of ticket-holders are kept clear—Certified, directed by Roy Surette, is offering an open, “no-shushing” environment where viewers can relax and enjoy the show at their comfort level. A “chill-out zone” in the main lobby will be available for people who may need a break from being in the theatre; they can re-enter at any time.
The show and the overall experience combined are all to break down the stigma around mental health. Originally lined up for Gateway’s 2020-2021 season but cancelled due to COVID-19, the play has taken on even greater resonance due to the effects of living with lockdowns and physical distancing for two long years. During the pandemic when everything was on hold, the artist launched a podcast called Mad Practice, with Calgary’s Inside Out Theatre artistic and executive director Col Cseke, expanding on some of the themes captured in Certified.
“The idea was that in a world gone mad, the crazy people might just know what to do,” says Derbyshire, who is a recipient of a 2021 Fleck Fellowship at the Banff Centre for the Arts. “I’d noticed that, living with various kinds of mental illness and brain injury and learning disabilities, I’m quite skilled at dealing with uncertainty. I had a lot of friends that were coming up against what felt like outsized emotions and maybe some distorted thinking for the first time in their lives or perhaps for such a prolonged period, so I put out the podcast with my friend Col Cseke.
“Now I think there are probably more people who are experiencing what we refer to as mental illness and wanting to have the conversation around ‘How is it that I can self regulate? What is it I need to ask my family or my workplace to help me co-regulate and how can I do that for others?’ The podcast was really to answer that current need in the pandemic, and I think Certified was an urgent play before and perhaps is even more urgent now.”
Derbgyshire has been keeping busy with many other projects lately. They have finished a forthcoming auto-fiction book called Mercy Gene: The Man-made Making of a Mad Woman (Goose Lane Editions) and are working on a new play called Karajokee. “It is all about accountability and standup,” they say of the latter. “Can we stay funny, cross the line and apologize, and then come back across the line? I don’t want to lose humour. An interesting question in the time of cancel culture.”
JD Derbyshire. Ben Laird photo
By sharing some of their experiences and insights in Certified, Derbyshire hopes they can help create greater awareness and understanding about mental health while doing away with outdated notions.
“The most bothersome thing to me is if you get mental illness your life is over, that it’s a solid state, it’s one and done. It’s not that,” Derbyshire says. “But we do need to talk more about what it is that we can do to live well with any kind of mental distress and really listen deeply to people, because it is an individual experience.
“We have to educate ourselves about medications,” they add. “A lot of times, things are presented in binaries, and as a gender non -binary person, I am sensitive to all binaries. I live mostly in the middle….A great binary is set up between anti-psychiatry and pro-psychiatry. I really long for a future where we recognize what medications can do but that the government almost certainly should be paying for everyone’s therapy. It’s preventative. It gives us skills to cope. Medication can only do so much.”
Derbyshire emphasizes that it’s not their or anyone’s place to shame people for being on medication, although “in psychiatry, there's a tendency to overmedicate”.
“We want to make sure we are responsible for learning what medications can or can’t do,” they note. “Then what else? What other skills are there? Because quite often there’s underlying trauma that happened….People need to learn how to be in a good loving relationship with their own mind and their own hearts.”
For more information, see Gateway Theatre.
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