Page 40 - Flathead Beacon // 3.9.16

EVENTS 42 MOVIE REVIEWS 43 SIDE DISH 46 PAWS & CLAWS 48 Arts&Entertainment
On Childbirth, Psychosis,
and Playing Monopoly with God
Melissa Bangs to perform show based on an experience of postpartum psychosis at the O’Shaughnessy Center
BY CLARE MENZEL OF THE BEACON
Y THE TIME THE CURTAIN drops on “Playing Monopoly with God & Other True Stories,” a one-
woman non ction storytelling perfor- mance, next Saturday, March 12, some 2,000 people across Western Montana will have laughed and cried along with Missoula’s own Melissa Bangs.
Bangs began telling her story in front of audiences in February 2015, three-and-a- half years after delivering a healthy baby girl, Adelaide Bangingson. It’s the story of three months that followed, during which Bangs fought through postpar- tum psychosis mania, a condition trig- gered by hormone depletion and sleep deprivation. Institutionalized for nearly one month then sent home on psychotic drugs that left her distant and unable to breastfeed, it was only after Bangs sought out a naturopathic physician who righted her world with hormone therapy that she escaped her alternate psychotic reality and returned to motherhood.
It’s a di cult story, but it’s not uncom- mon. Statistically, Bangs has noted, post- partum mental health disorders are the most common birth complication. And the number of moms, dads, sons, and daughters who hear Bangs’ story matters.
“It’s about one of those topics vastly
Melissa Bangs. COURTESY NP IMAGES
shared and rarely talked about,” Bangs
said of postpartum struggles. “We know that so many people [who experience it] never say a word.”
At rst, as Bangs, a frank and uninhib- ited graduate of New York City improv comedy club Upright Citizens Brigade, says, the show “was healing, it was cathar- tic, to have people cry and laugh out loud
and to have an audience go the distance.” But, she continued, the performance “stopped being about me a long time ago.”
Now she uses the stage to empower the women who feel silenced by stigma and shame, and to introduce this mas- sive struggle to those who may have never considered its existence. From sold-out shows to gushing media and fan
reviews, it’s clear that the performance, which Bangs describes as “fun and ridic- ulous and sad and inappropriate and pro- foundly honest,” is striking a cord.
“Everybody says they nd something in the show that rocked them,” Bangs said. “The number one comment is ‘I was laughing or crying the entire time.’ But the other thing people were saying
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MARCH 9, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM