'Blue/Orange' confronts mental illness, race, politics

"Blue/Orange," Joe Penhall's serio-comic study of two psychiatrists clashing over the treatment of a patient, quietly starts previews at Intiman Theatre tonight.

But when it debuted at London's Royal National Theatre back in 2000, it was greeted with great fanfare. English reviewers praised Penhall for having created "a true battle of minds" and "the year's most exciting play."

And the 32-year-old dramatist went on to win the London Evening Standard's best play award, a 2000 Critics Circle Prize, and a coveted Olivier Award, as "Blue/Orange" segued to a successful commercial run in the West End.

The reception was not as rosy when the play crossed the Atlantic to an Off-Broadway mounting last November. But that doesn't bother Penhall.

"I was happy with the New York actors, and the production was very good," said the now 35-year-old writer from London. "I think some criticism had to do with a bit of a cultural gap. This is a different kind of play than critics are used to seeing in New York."

The Brits seemed less bothered by a theatrical premise that has two shrinks professionally duking it out in front of a patient during a clinical interview. And by the play's stressing of socio-political debate over psychological character development.

The central issue in "Blue/Orange" is the British mental-health system and its failures, which Penhall observed firsthand as a reporter for London's Hammerstein Guardian newspaper.

"There was this big change in mental-health practices at the time, with lots of people being released from hospitals and sent into the community," he noted. "I was fascinated by that, and found it was happening all over the world. It's a great injustice which hasn't been covered enough in theater."

In "Blue/Orange," a young African-Anglo man named Christopher (played at Intiman by Sylvester Foday Kamara) is about to be released after a 28-day hospital commitment.

The veteran psychiatrist Robert (Laurence Ballard) believes Christopher's "borderline personality" condition is largely a product of ethno-cultural factors, and it would be wrong to hold him longer. But Bruce (Ian Brennan), a shrink-in-training, suspects he needs further, intensive treatment.

Penhall wanted the doctors' increasingly heated dispute to keep the audience's sympathies in flux. "Sometimes goodies are bad, and baddies are good," he suggests. "Robert hijacks a rather radical line on mental illness for conservative ends. He very shrewdly adopts the mantle of the groovy, loving hipster psychiatrist. But he's actually pandering to a conservative government doctrine — get patients out of the hospital as fast as possible to save funds."

As for Robert's younger colleague: "Bruce makes an ideological stand because he believes it could be a tragedy to release Christopher if he's not well. That may seem the more conservative view, but he could be right."

Penhall endeavored to make the debate lively on both ends, but what does he believe? "A lot of mentally sick people don't want to be let out of hospital into some housing project where there aren't adequate resources available to them and they can't cope."

He continued, "I think there's a myth that mental hospitals are all 'Cuckoo's Nest'-type places, and it's not true."

Another aspect of the play, poignantly evoked in London by Chiwetel Ejiofor's portrayal of Christopher, is the slippery nature of mental disease itself. If a person "seems" normal, yet insists oranges are blue, can he be sane?

"Many of us have a casual, pop-psychology understanding of these illnesses," Penhall contends. "I do take a certain delight in debunking clichés, and one is that you can easily spot a madman — which is totally untrue. This illness can be very confusing. I wanted the London actors to be hip to that, so we went to visit psych words, and they got it instantly."

Penhall agrees with some of Robert's points, including his assertion that latent racism can impact diagnosis. "I found the statistic that a black man is 12 times more likely to be diagnosed schizophrenic than a white man in Britain. That tells me people are still assessed by their cultural behavior."

Penhall was pleased that the mental health specialists who consulted on the National Theatre production found his analysis of the system "spot on." And London psychiatrists clamored to see "Blue/Orange." (One doc wanted to use the script as a training tool for new clinicians.)

It's not yet clear whether Seattle patrons will find the play — directed here by Kate Whoriskey — equally relevant to America's treatment and views of mental disease. Intiman Theatre will host a post-performance forum Aug. 5 with Dr. Tim Forslund of Seattle's Community Psychiatric Clinic to consider that and other related topics.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com