A Musical about Manic Depression Is All the Rage

Issaquah-based playwright Brian Yorkey blows the minds of Broadway.

The Broadway cast of Next to Normal | Photo by Evan Kafka

Brian Yorkey, 38, is the first Broadway playwright whose career was launched in Issaquah. “If there had been a rock museum on [Issaquah’s] Front Street, I would have become a geologist,” says Yorkey. Instead, there was the Village Theatre, so he became the toast of the Great White Way. Last month, New York Times critic Ben Brantley raved, “No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart — or wrings it as thoroughly — as Next to Normal,” Yorkey’s “brave, breathtaking” musical about bipolar disorder. Now Yorkey divides his time between New York, Hollywood — and Front Street, where he directed January’s Village Theatre show, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Yorkey got his first showbiz break in seventh grade, when he followed his pal Heidi Darchuk (daughter of Village Theatre cofounder Carl Darchuk) into a backstage job on Bye Bye Birdie. He was hooked.

The next summer, he stepped onstage in Godspell, “mostly sitting on a dumpster and singing along,” recalls Village producer Robb Hunt. The adults let the kids do most of the work. “It gave us a sense of power and possibility,” says Yorkey.

Yorkey’s charismatic presence — a true stage presence — really fills a room. Sitting in a rehearsal studio first thing in the morning (anathema to theatre folk), with opening night of Earnest a week away, he has the energy to talk for seventy-five minutes straight. “I’m a theatre nerd,” he explains.

At seventeen, he stage-managed an original musical adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. “That’s when I got it that musicals are written by people. You grow up thinking that Rodgers and Hammerstein are these mythical figures. When I got to see how these things are written, it helped send me on a path of writing myself.” Days after graduation from Issaquah High, Yorkey got Roald Dahl to consent to an all-kid musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Brian wrote his own script, and lyrics for new songs,” says Village Theatre Kidstage director Kandis Branum. “He was fearless.”

Hunt hired him as house manager, and he supervised ushers and concessions while writing plays like Funny Pages (1993), a collaboration with Scott Warrender, the witty composer of Das Barbecü.

At Columbia University in New York in the 1990s, Yorkey majored in religion. But by night he wrote and directed “off-off-off-Broadway shows” like Making Tracks (2000). “The show was kind of a mess — but the New York Times review was very encouraging. ‘This part works, this part doesn’t, but overall it’s an important show.’ That set a lot of things in motion for me.”

In Issaquah, Robb Hunt saw the review and offered Yorkey a job as associate artistic director. For the next seven years, Yorkey programmed new works and directed. Artistic director Steve Tomkins stuck to the classics; the younger Yorkey took on the rock musicals — Evita, Tommy, Aida.

He also adapted Ang Lee’s film The Wedding Banquet, which toured to Taiwan and Singapore, and wrote Feeling Electric, a musical about a depressive mother, with his New York composer friend Tom Kitt. “We had an assignment to write a ‘ten-minute musical.’ Well, I had just seen a TV report about shock therapy. Over 80 percent of the doctors who prescribe shock therapy are men, and over 70 percent of the patients who receive it are women. That made me think: ‘What if there was a woman struggling with mental health issues, who has been treated by men all her life — doctors, a well-meaning husband — who have all wanted to help her, and have all somehow failed?’

“That becomes a story not only about the mental health establishment, but also about men and women. Women who are looking for a knight in shining armor.”

For years, Yorkey and Kitt struggled to fit Feeling Electric’s heavy subject matter into the more lighthearted form of the musical. “It broke away from the serious aspects into entertainment several times,” Hunt says of the early versions: a 2002 Village Originals staged reading and a 2005 workshop. “We must have written more than a hundred songs for this show over the past ten years,” says Yorkey.

The Broadway cast of Next to Normal: Alice Ripley as Diana, J. Robert Spencer as Dan, Jennifer Damiano as Natalie, Aaron Tveit as Gabe.

Their depressed maternal heroine, Diana, is a modern-day Alice, fallen down the rabbit hole of mental illness. Early on, Diana sings:

My psychopharmacologist and I . . .

It’s like an odd romance.

Intense and very intimate,

We do our dance. . . .

And though he’ll never hold me

He’ll always take my calls;

It’s truly like he told me:

Without a little lift,

The ballerina falls.

Ultimately, Diana tries electroshock therapy, singing as she watches herself on the table:

In an instant, lightning flashes

And the burst might leave me blind —

When the bolt of lightning crashes

And it burns right through my mind.

It’s like someone drained my brain out,

Set my frozen mind to thaw.

Let the lethargy and pain out

While I stood and watched, in awe.

I am riding on the brightest buzz . . .

I am worlds away from who I was . . .

And they told me it would change me —

Though they don’t know how it does. . . .

Have I blown my mind forever?

Is cloudy my new clear?

Wish I were here

Wish I were here

Yorkey and Kitt entered the script in the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival. In the audience was Carole Rothman, who went on to produce the show — now titled Next to Normal — at off-Broadway’s Second Stage in 2008, directed by Michael Greif (Rent). The Times was encouraging; so was The Washington Post when the show went to DC’s Arena Stage.

“That gave us a chance to work on the things that we hadn’t quite nailed in New York,” says Yorkey. They axed campy satirical numbers like Diana’s breakdown in a Costco store, and Brantley hailed the changes when the show got to Broadway’s Booth Theatre last month. “The fact that it’s finally here is a thrill like no other,” says Yorkey.

Now he’s off to Hollywood to Americanize Love Undercover, the frothy Hong Kong hit about an undercover lady cop who falls for a gangster. “I really look forward to having a movie made,” says Yorkey.

Of course he’ll make it. If you can make it on Front Street, you can make it anywhere.

All lyrics © Brian Yorkey