Cracked Open – 25 May 2025

At first pass, Cracked Open seems like a moving play for audiences who haven’t dealt with serious mental illness. Unfortunately, I not only have multiple diagnoses, but I have been a mental health professional for over a decade in various capacities, including as a certified peer support specialist, suicide hotline staff member, therapist, and social worker (ironically in the South Bronx, which playwright Gail Kreigel mentions in the play). I hate to pick apart a good story, especially one trying to raise awareness about mental health issues, but my personal experience in the mental health field made the inaccuracies glaring, and my personal experience as a writer raised several questions about missed opportunities that would have made this story more unique. Structurally, Kreigel goes back and forth between telling this specific story about this specific cast of characters and trying to use this story as a broader, everyman kind of story meant to teach about the prevalence of mental illness. It’s an admirable goal, and while it certainly has moments that make the audience feel something, Kreigel does the audience a disservice by painting the world of treatment as dangerous and expensive. While helping your child does restructure your life, Cracked Open suggests a level of sacrifice that is daunting and also suggests that treatment is a toss up, when there are evidence-based, scientifically proven options in the real world.

Essentially, the child with serious mental illness, Tilde (Katherine Reis) is a homewrecker and her treatment experience increases her trauma and destroys her family. I’d like to dispel some inaccuracies in this depiction because I feel it is important as a mental health patient and a mental health professional. First of all, Tilde’s episode that results in her first hospitalization would not result in a three month hospitalization. I doubt they’d keep her three days. She’d be referred to an intensive outpatient program in real life. Then there’s a scene in which many doctors want to diagnose Tilde with everything on the planet and the point is that their diagnoses don’t agree. This is meant to be an everyman moment, but they never mention bipolar disorder, which is very clearly what Katherine Reis was coached to portray. Not having a specific diagnosis for the character increases the murkiness about mental health issues. The experience of someone being suffocated in a locked door facility is perilously close to impossible in today’s world. In locked facilities, you are not permitted to have personal belongings. You are not even permitted to wear your own clothes. The idea that anyone in a facility like that would have access to handcuffs and a plastic bag is absurd, and the idea that the doors are locked but the patients can wander the facility freely and there’s nobody nearby to help is also incredibly inaccurate. In facilities like that, there is a nurse at every door. Patients are never alone together. They couldn’t have sex or attempt to kill each other.  I also find it very hard to believe that Tilde’s mother, Mae (Pamela Bob) just let Tilde’s friend from the group home, Hope (Madeline Grace Jones) move into her home on so few questions. If I had tried to have a friend move into my parents’ home with me at any point in my life, mental illness or not, there would have been a massive fight ultimately ending in my friend living somewhere else.

Now let’s pick apart some other characters. The most accurate depiction was Tilde’s little sister, Edith (Blaire Dimisa). Dimisa nailed it. The resentment, the jealousy, and the pain emerging out of suddenly being an afterthought in her parents’ eyes was incredibly believable and true to life. Her grandmother, Lilian (Lisa Pelikan) is also spot on, and Uncle Michael (Paul Castree) felt plausible. The parents, regrettably, were all over the place. Mae’s panic attack was overacted, though her depression was quite believable. When she got taken off of her big architectural project and had no reaction at all, it didn’t read to me as having been pushed to a point of not caring. It seemed like she missed a moment to humanize her character and evoke empathy in audience members who have at times had to shelve their dreams. The father, Rich (Bart Shatto), who cared more about his reputation than helping his daughter, never made any attempt to understand what his daughter had and passed up opportunities to help. His ego was too big to be plausible, and his abandonment of the entire family too small (it was mentioned in a single line, stating that he “might come around” towards the end).

There were some missed opportunities to make the story more interesting if not more accurate. For example, Michael has the camera footage from the incident in the South Bronx and has been living in Rich’s shadow his whole life. What if he had run a proper story that had helped expose this facility’s negligence and helped all of the residents, Tilde included? Then Michael gets his hero moment and human beings are helped. What if the friend Tilde had wanted to bring home with her had been voices she was hearing and not an actual, tangible person? Mae having to decide whether or not to take home her daughter when her daughter is experiencing psychosis would have been incredibly dramatic and moving.

For anyone experiencing mental illness and considering various courses of treatment, I’d like to reiterate some key points. You will have a diagnosis and a treatment plan, as well as mental health professionals who provide therapy, psychiatry, and other services. You are safe in a locked door facility, and they will check to make sure you swallowed your medications. Nobody will be noncompliant. If locked doors are too high a level of care for you, group homes do allow you to leave and visit the outside world, but they do mandate therapy, psychiatry, and support groups, as well as chores around the group home to build responsibility. Private facilities are expensive, but you are not taking a dangerous risk by choosing less expensive options.

While I do believe in the importance of allies and applaud people for trying to raise awareness about stories that are not theirs, Gail Kreigel’s Cracked Open is a level of unrealistic that I feel is not just unacceptable, but also dangerous to today’s mental health community. The play makes treatment look unsafe. It blames parents, and ultimately results in a separation. It reinforces stigma and says nothing about what treatment actually consists of beyond medication or how to help the person experiencing mental illness or their family. There is so much help! There’s the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL). There are intensive outpatient programs teaching cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy (and workbooks that accompany them). There’s electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). There are peer support services that are one-on-one and support groups not just for the person who is suffering from the mental illness but also for their family and friends. Please seek help if you need it and don’t be deterred by artistic depictions that sacrifice accuracy in the name of dramatic storytelling.

I attended this performance on a press pass from JT Public Relations.