January 11–18, 2001

theater

On Her Own

Solo act: Holum as Christy Warren.

Suli Holum talks about flying solo and her new play The Lollipop Project.

by Juliet Fletcher

A man approaches the desk, a Trojan expression on his stout features. He has come to take his daughter home. A moment later, his daughter, a baleful shell of her 13-year-old former self, spies her parents leaving the mental hospital where she is kept, registering them through a haze of medication.

This is a scene from Suli Holum’s new show, The Lollipop Project, opening Jan. 17 at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5.

Based on the true story of a teenage girl in a mental hospital who commits suicide with a lollipop, the work is, for Holum, a huge first step into the world of self-produced theater. That’s because Holum, best known as co-founder and co-artistic director of the experimental ensemble troupe Pig Iron Theatre Company, has taken on the challenge of writing, directing and performing all of the show’s characters.

In 1998, after graduating from Swarthmore College, Holum, busy establishing Pig Iron, read an article in Rolling Stone about San Diego teen Christy Scheck, who had been admitted to a mental health facility. Responding badly to changing from child to adolescent, she was diagnosed with depression. Within one month of admission to the hospital Scheck was administered a cyclical routine of psychological drugs. Within five months she had restricted contact with her parents, and shortly after she took her own life.

These details immediately raised Holum’s curiosity, demonstrating "how often natural teenage upheaval gets diagnosed as something abnormal."

The challenge to create a drama from a real-life event was one Holum imposed on herself; when she accepted a Shell Fellowship in Drama at the Institute of Education in Singapore in 1998, she returned to the article, burning with desire to dramatize "the overmedication of people." As part of the fellowship she presented a prototype version of Lollipop in Singapore. Soon afterwards, with the aid of an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, Holum took time off from Pig Iron to develop Lollipop into a full-length work, and later presented a work-in-progress at the 2000 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Since its conception, Holum insists Lollipop has come a long way.

"At first, I had a very strong feeling about who the bad guys were — I think that’s natural — and as you get to know all the players it becomes far more interesting, identifying the good impulses in everybody."

And, she says, she’s worked hard on achieving a balance between the facts and an experimental approach to performance. "I never was interested in writing a documentary of this girl’s life," she explains.

She’s emphatic that Lollipop isn’t "anti-psychiatry" and doesn’t suggest that psychiatric drugs don’t work for some people. Scheck, she suggests, may have needed help, even medication, but it’s the complexity of the subject that she found refreshing.

"I find the pressure from popular culture is for entertainment to be escapist, but it sometimes does more harm than good.… People need to be reminded that life can be painful, and shockingly so; those feelings are normal."

Onstage, Christy Warren, Holum’s main character, exists as a glorious mime, whose eyes you follow as they look askance at the world, and who rocks, flips and hurtles through her confusion with dazzling physicality amid a spare sound design created by Holum’s fiancé, Trey Lyford.

Holum’s ensemble portrayal owes much to the technique the Pig Iron performers used in her 1999 Barrymore-nominated play, Gentlemen Volunteers, where characterization is attained through miming a single defining detail. For example, for Christy’s mother it’s wavy hair; for the hospital intern it’s a spiral notepad. Yet Christy doesn’t have a notable signifier; we see the other characters through her stark outlook.

But a single perspective can become tedious, even for a solo artist. Holum describes, with pride, how Aaron Posner, a non-voting consultant to the Independence Foundation, attended a low-key preview of Lollipop last month and remarked how wholeheartedly "the community gathers round projects like this."

Holum demurs, "It’s good not to work alone all the time."

The Lollipop Project, Jan. 17-28, $15, Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., 610-690-1520.