In Her Head

Dramatic Theatre - None - Ages 16+ - 90 mins ·

Have you ever watched the Pixar movie Inside Out* and thought, “if only there were an ADHD split-stage play production where a black college student uses her psychiatrist appointment to act out the mental breakdown she had over the school year by turning her mental illnesses into personified characters?”

Wait? What did you say?

Oh, were you thinking that only a mentally ill playwright looking for an outlet to process her mental breakdown would write a parody like that?

Well, that’s a weirdly intrusive yet accurate assessment. I suspect the fact that the protagonist and mental illness characters occasionally break out into spoken word poetry isn’t normal either.

Anyway…

It’s all over. There is nowhere to hide. Pre-med student Pandora has just failed her sophomore year of college without anyone noticing; except now, the spotlight is on her. She sits on a couch in front of the curtain, waiting for her new psychiatrist. This is not the hot girl summer she was hoping for.

An offstage voice introduces itself as Pandora’s new psychiatrist, Dr. Green. Pandora, being a deeply unserious person, cracks a few jokes while Dr. Green tells her that her test results demonstrate that she is experiencing dissociation, acute panic attacks, anxiety, and depression.

To properly diagnose Pandora, Dr. Green asks her to describe her mental state throughout the academic school year. She agrees. The curtain opens, and the play begins.

Pandora acts out her external world on the left half of the stage, whether it be the bus stop where Pandora gets stalked, the festering dorm room she shares with her best friend Myelin, a hospital room, or the poetry club.

On the right side of the stage is Pandora’s internal world, a tiny universe that consists of two rooms: the Control Room and the Breakroom.

The Control Room is where the magic or, um, chaos happens. Pandora has free will, but her perception of the world is dictated by a cast of comedic, well-meaning tyrannical characters, namely Dep (Depression), Annie (Anxiety), Libby (Libido), and Charisma. They all watch and interact with Pandora’s external world from completely different perspectives.

The Breakroom is where Auntie Em (Empathy) resides, the most powerful and vulnerable character in Pandora’s internal world. Auntie Em is the character who is needed the most to manage the chaos of the Control Room. Auntie Em has a small problem, though. She’s a hermit who refuses to go into the Control Room ever since Pandora’s childhood friend committed suicide on her watch. Whoops! Instead, she spends all of her time in the Breakroom, which she has converted into a crochet and cookie-filled therapist’s office where she counsels the remaining internal characters.

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Location : The Madnani Theater (Main Space), 6760 Lexington Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038