press release

Summer 2008
Contact Michael Mack

credit: fotobytimo

MIT poet finds lyric beauty
in mother's schizophrenia

performs nationally-acclaimed solo show

For over a decade, Boston-based solo performer Michael Mack has been preaching a kind of gospel. The good news? His mother's recovery from schizophrenia as told in his one-man play Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues).

Directed by Daniel Gidron, this award-winning production has played nationwide at venues that include the US Library of Congress, the Harvard Medical School, and Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center.

Written in collaboration with his family, Mack's multi-character monologue gives voice to his mother and the voices that haunt her, as well as his father and other family members as they navigate a devastating reality.

The play follows Mack's mother through state hospitals, halfway houses, jails, and homelessness until she finds recovery through an unexpected grace. In the blurred landscape between madness and religious illumination, Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) is one family's journey of deliverance.

"My mother's illness profoundly shaped me," Mack said. "For decades I felt shadowed by it, afraid I'd get sick too." He explained that mental illness is more common than most people know. One in every five families is affected by major mental illness. One in every twenty people will suffer a clinical breakdown sometime in their lives.

"Whenever I do this show," he said, "people come up afterward telling me about their own mother's illness, or their father's, their sister's, their son's." Increasingly recognized as a brain disorder with physiological roots, mental illness is more common than cancer, diabetes, or heart disease.

Mack thinks of the show as "a kind of calling. It chose me." After serving in the US Air Force, Mack enrolled at MIT's prestigious Sloan School of Management, expecting to major in business science. He took a poetry class for elective credit -- "I needed an easy A" -- but the course changed his life. Childhood memories poured onto the page as poems.

Encouraged by his mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, and by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, Mack changed majors and graduated from MIT's Writing Program.

His poems went from the page to the stage when he discovered poetry slam. In Boston's thriving poetry scene, Mack became a poetry slam champion, and represented Boston at the National Poetry Slam in 1998 and 1999.

An audience member at a Cambridge venue invited Mack to share his work at a local affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Word spread, and soon he was presenting at statewide and national mental health conferences for NAMI and other mental health organizations.

His is in demand especially during National Mental Health Month (May) and Mental Illness Awareness Week (in October), using the annual observances to raise public awareness about mental illness, and to help reduce misunderstanding and stigma.

In additional to traditional theatrical engagements -- including a six week run Off-Off-Broadway -- Mack now performs regularly for mental health professionals and consumers, increasingly at state hospitals for the chronically ill.

"He channels his mother," said Dr. Laurence Guttmacher, chief of psychiatry and acting clinical director at the Rochester Psychiatric Center. "This is not an easy crowd," Guttmacher said of his patients. "But they were rapt. Afterward, they said, 'He gets it. He understands.'"

Excerpts from Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Best Catholic Writing, and they have aired on NPR. The play was awarded a development grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council -- the state's most prestigious award for new theater works.

Asked about A Beautiful Mind, the Oscar-winning film about MIT Professor and Nobel Laureate John Nash, whose brilliant career in mathematics was cut short by schizophrenia, Mack said, "The movie's strength is that it portrays someone with mental illness in more than the usual stereotype. It brought mental illness squarely into the public discussion."

"But it's a Hollywood movie with a romantic Hollywood ending. Recovery from schizophrenia doesn't usually bring a Nobel Prize (though it should). And recovery is more than return to a conventional life. For as long as my mother lived, she needed special care. But she recovered in the sense that after years of living on the streets and in state hospitals, she found stability and dignity in a community that loved her for who she was."