A mashup of historical drama and romantic comedy, this play time shifts between a contemporary university where Neuropsychologist Helen Harlow struggles with teaching Psych 101 and taming her own mind, and 1848 Vermont where her physician ancestor John Harlow tends to Phineas Gage, a construction foreman who miraculously survives an explosion that shoots an iron rod though his head. Helen’s anxiety flares up in the challenge of her new teaching job, while she also deals with a new love interest and tries to support a student with whom she has more than a little in common. In 1848, Phineas refuses to allow his shocking injury to keep him down, even though those around him experience a very new personality emerging as he recovers and his fame spreads.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with its themes of madness and mortality, weaves its way through both time periods as the characters choose between action and inaction and struggle to find that elusive spark that will give fuel them without destroying them.
Through the lens of a famous and true case in psychology and neuroscience, the human mind, brain, and heart are explored with humour, theatricality and Hamlet! What emerges is a play that takes a touching and insightful look at mental health in the academy and beyond.
