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Your Average Obsessive

From the Superhuman to the Simply Human

The first time I remember seeing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder represented in contemporary culture was during a visit to my parents’ home in 2008. They told me about a quirky detective drama they’d grown to like called Monk, where a San Francisco cop, brought to life by veteran stage and screen actor Tony Shalhoub, comes down with a mean case of OCD that helps him solve seemingly unsolvable crimes with panache and brilliance.

“If only!” I remember thinking to myself. At that point, my OCD had primarily been an impediment to my graduate studies, rather than an asset. I wish my mental illness made me as brilliant as Adrian Monk. It would make my life a lot easier.

Popular culture is littered with characters whose OCD affords them extraordinary talent. Scrubs’ Kevin Casey, played by Michael J. Fox, is a renowned medical practitioner because of his OCD. Alongside Casey and Monk, there’s famed novelist Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets, and even Elementary’s Sherlock is said to have OCD.

These characters do not always reflect the realities of life for many, indeed most, people who have OCD. Those of us who make up the OCD community are just trying to slog through daily life while handling a medical condition that is painful and expensive to treat.

But what television and Hollywood films have not provided in terms of frank, first-person perspectives on OCD, contemporary theater is making up for. Three artists, all of them women, have caught my attention with their sometimes harrowing, sometimes endearing theatrical representations of surviving with OCD. Theater is specifically offering these artists a venue to present honest accounts of what it’s like to live with the illness, whether directly through solo performance or by embedding their own experiences in the voices of fictional characters.

Jessica Fisher

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Playwright Jessica Fisher is based in London, and her OCD inspired her to pen Ghost Town (2014), a three character drama about a young man struggling to aid a hurt friend while his contamination fears (anxiety about blood, sickness, dirt) and harm fears (the fear of hurting someone else) run rampant in his mind.

The unique conceit of Ghost Town is the literal figuration of OCD as a flesh-and-blood person; Keira, the personified representation of Joe’s OCD fears, torments him. The other character on stage, Megan, cannot see or hear Keira taunting Joe about infection or reminding him of all his “dark thoughts.”

In the play’s trailer, Damson Idris, the actor who plays Joe, wears simple jeans and a gray hoodie and speaks of the main character wanting to find a sense of “belonging and identity.” Ghost Town emphasizes OCD’s mundane, yet eerily haunting and terrifying qualities.

Maria Bamford
In her “Anxiety Song,” a tune with a wandering, barely-there melody, comedienne and actress Maria Bamford describes the bizarre anxieties that plague her mind:

If I keep the ice cube trays full no one will die.

As long as I clench my fists at odd intervals then the darkness within me won’t force me to do anything inappropriately violent or sexual at dinner parties.

As long as I keep humming a tune I won’t “turn gay.”

Hmmm Hmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmm.

They can’t get you if you’re singing a song. Yeah!

Bamford, a regular on TV shows such as Adventure Time, Benched, and Arrested Development, performs the song as a part of her stand-up comedy routine, which she’s currently touring around the US. The “Anxiety Song” also appears in her web series The Maria Bamford Show.

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In the show, filmed at Bamford’s parents’ house, we learn that Bamford’s therapist encourages her to “sing her anxieties” to alleviate the pain they cause her. A performance within a performance, the song attests to the unique potential of theatrical genres to address mental illness. The show is about the aftermath of Bamford’s nervous breakdown, brought on when she stopped taking the medications that helped manage her OCD.

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Bamford’s show feels eccentric yet familiar. We watch her go to Target, cope with crippling anxiety, cuddle with her elderly pug named Blossom, and search for a steady job. She also describes traveling across the country with a guy named Lips. It’s relatable stuff, really.

Alison Bechdel
In 2013, performance artist and playwright Lisa Kron adapted Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home (2006) into a musical. In doing so, Kron brings Bechdel’s artful depiction of her and her father’s OCD to the Great White Way: it’s recently been announced that Fun Home will soon be produced at Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway. Bechdel’s OCD is documented with precise attention in the Fun Home graphic novel. We see her perform embodied acts of ritualizing in the comic’s panels as she counts, checks, wipes away imaginary cobwebs, and religiously kisses her stuffed animals.

Much of the OCD in the graphic novel has, disappointingly, been removed from the musical. But I think that a careful viewer can see Bechdel and her father’s disorder peek through in Kron’s adaptation: he still obsessively attends to their elaborate Victorian house, and young Alison’s halting “I feel…I feel…” in the song "Ring of Keys” mirrors the doubt that plagues her diary entries in the graphic novel.

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What all three of these artists share is a commitment to faithfully rendering the ordinariness of life with mental illness. On the contemporary stage, OCD is not represented as an entertaining quirk that affords the sufferer superhuman abilities. Instead, the disorder is embedded in scenes about family life, keeping a diary, and the everyday labor of survival. 

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