Duality – 12 December 2024

If you’ve ever studied psychology, you know that there are a lot of phrases people are taught to use to help someone who is struggling with suicidal ideation. The characters in Duality use many of these phrases to help Camilla (Caroline Ghosn), the protagonist of this piece, who consistently displays the blunted affect of a person on psychiatric medication. Camilla seems to be stabilized, and her actual words are logical, insightful, and reflective of the way you are taught to talk in mental health recovery programs (like CBT or DBT). The playwright, Anthony M. Laura, posits that if everyone really behaved the way the textbooks tell us to, the person experiencing the mental health challenge can find a way to keep going, despite the occasional awkward moment where a particular recommended technique doesn’t work for this specific person.

The story builds in lots of thematic ideas commonly felt by those who face mental health challenges, including feeling overstimulated, disappearing into your own head when life gets difficult, becoming everyone else’s self help book, struggling to have people understand that this is how your brain works independent of any traumatic or protective events, feeling like there’s a barrier between you and the rest of the world, and looking stupid/losing good opportunities when you stop to use your tools. I found the moment where Camilla successfully staves off a panic attack with deep breathing particularly insightful. She did exactly what people with anxiety disorders are taught to do— she stopped everything to breathe. However, this sudden transition to deep breathing was awkward and uncomfortable for the other person, and even though the breathing technique worked to stop the panic attack, using it still cost Camilla the ability to have a desired experience with Emilia (Meg Joshi). This was one of the show’s few acknowledgements that some techniques/treatments have consequences/side effects, and that the trade off can sometimes be between bad and worse.

Duality juxtaposed many helping methods and many types of people who can use them. The story spanned several generations and multiple ways to exist with wisdom and emotional intelligence, and each had a role to play in helping Camilla thoroughly think through her decision to commit suicide. Spanning three generations, Camilla was met with optimism and cynicism, truth and concealed truth, seriousness and humor, people who know her story and people who don’t, individual encounters and group encounters, realities and flashbacks/fantasies, those who accept her mental illness as unchangeable and those who want her to keep fighting to live their definition of a healthier life, people who think she is selfish and people who think she is selfless… And in this swirling world of suicide notes and dashed hopes, there lives a whole person who feels very strongly that she should be allowed to decide when she’s had enough suffering and when it’s time to end her life. Like a grief textbook, she points out that people move on and keep going, feel sad for a while and sometimes get sad memories, but ultimately will be okay.

To me, the ending is unambiguous. Camilla decides to start a new romantic relationship and is willing to give it a try. Choosing life comes from many people who subtly supported her throughout her journey. Her grandmother (Candy Dato) asked the first question on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale: do you have a plan? A sister said, “I can’t leave until I know you’re going to be okay.” Nobody challenged Camilla’s belief that, “maybe we were broken from birth” or Camilla’s sense that she’s going through life like a robot, missing key emotions felt keenly be others. Camilla’s personal agency and autonomy was respected when she opposed the statement, “we need to get you to the hospital.” Though she balks at the line, “you matter to us,” she finds it hard to deny it when it comes from a teenager. Camilla’s family understood that she might not be ready, stating, “when you’re ready, I’m always here” and when they struggled to connect the dots the way that Camilla did, they asked, “can you help us understand” instead of saying that they didn’t or couldn’t understand.

Duality brings hope into a dark world and validates just how much psychology as a field has progressed. The show celebrates that if a person is confronted in all the right ways from people with varying levels of meaning to them and varying depths of shared connections, that person can find a way to see the hope in a new adventure and how powerfully lives can change. As somebody who works in the industry, I have always been somewhat cynical of certain phrases being helpful, some of which were said in this piece. But setting boundaries and acknowledging realities were critical parts of Camilla’s journey, and they’re critical concepts in real life too. Despite the second act dragging and taking on too much, this is a show that asks, both literally and figuratively in a broader picture kind of way, a single question. “Can we try?” Duality tells us that if we can try, we can succeed.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Spin Cycle.