"I like to think of my art as a sewage treatment plant.”
It’s not often you hear an actor characterize their work that way, but that’s how former Gateway Theatre camp attendee and now instructor Megan Phillips described her one-woman show Not Enough, which is coming to the Vancouver Fringe Festival Sept. 8-18.
The show follows Phillips through a 10-day mediation process, with anxiety as a character she interacts with.
“One of the revelations I had on this retreat was that I have anxiety and spent my entire life covering it up with distractions,” she said, “whether it be food, work, or fun experiences, which by themselves are healthy things, but when used to mask deeper anxieties, led to self-destruction in my life.”
Because of that, the show contains some pretty heavy, dark passages hidden in the middle of an overall light-hearted comedy.
“It makes light of the darkness because you have to,” Phillips said. “It’s the only way of saying you survived some pretty intense stuff and got out the other side.”
She uses flashback scenes to focus on difficult periods in her life including a suicidal, self-harm scene taken from her teenage years. Another was being kicked out of a theatre group, and a visitation to a relationship break up that examines the ways she remained in an unhealthy situation because she was afraid of being alone.
Phillips worked with Vancouver Fringe Festival veteran T.J. Dawe, to develop the show.
“He wrote a show called Medicine that I saw in 2012 and said to myself, ‘Wow, you can do that with theatre, just take out your deepest darkest experiences, out them on display for the world to see and make it art?’”
Phillips said Dawe helped her remain committed to telling the story in an authentic manner.
“He really guided me to not just coax out these dark experiences, but he held my hand to the flame and any time I started to lie, exaggerate or brush aside and experience, he brought me right back into it and made sure I was writing the truth,” she said.
So, is the show her own form of therapy? “Absolutely,” she said.
And it’s provided benefits for her and audiences that have already seen Not Enough when it took to the stages at the fringe festivals in Edmonton and Winnipeg.
“I have been able to share those experiences with the world, but more importantly, people who are in a dark time, have gone through one, or don’t even know they are in one, have seen the show and come up to me at the end of it with tears in their eyes saying I’ve validated their experiences,” Phillips said.
She added the show has also provided loved ones of those experiencing anxiety with an insight to the condition.
“It makes me feel that nakedly displaying my deepest, darkest, grossest secrets actually has a purpose,” she said with a chuckle.
For more information about Not Enough and this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival, visit online at vancouverfringe.com.
