HEARING VOICES (SPEAKING IN TONGUES)
April 7 " May 14 at Times Square Arts Center

"Michael Mack's breathtaking performance casts vivid poetic light on one of life's most inexpressible and commonplace sorrows." -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Transcendent art that reaches out with unblinking honesty." -- Boston Globe

"Exquisite...heartbreaking. Will really resonate with people who know that awful place where insanity and love collide." -- National Public Radio

Boston-based solo performer Michael Mack premieres his acclaimed drama Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) at the Matthew Corozine Studio Theater in the Times Square Arts Center. Mack was five years old when his mother was struck by schizophrenia, and his 90-minute performance chronicles her decades-long odyssey from psychosis into redemption. The play has received impressive critical acclaim in cities that include Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Boston, and Philadelphia. Previews begin April 7th, with opening night scheduled for April 9th. The production, directed by Daniel Gidron, highlights National Mental Health Month (May) and has its final performance on Mother's Day.

Written in collaboration with his family, Mack's multi-character play gives voice to his mother and the voices that haunt her, as well as to his father and other family members as they face the effects of psychosis. Beginning with her chilling disintegration, Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) 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, this is the story of one family's search for 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 realize. One in every five families is affected. One in every twenty people will suffer a major breakdown sometime in their lives. "Whenever I do this show," he said, "people come up afterward to tell 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.

An MIT graduate who served in the US Air Force, Mack was mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin and Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, who encouraged him to mine his childhood memories for Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues). In additional to traditional theatrical engagements, Mack performs his show regularly for mental health professionals, which have included faculty and students of the Harvard Medical School. He has presented for dozens of statewide and national mental health conferences, and recently performed at the US Library of Congress.

Mack is also a poetry slam champion, and represented Boston at the National Poetry Slam in 1998 and 1999. An excerpt from the play has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as in America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Best Catholic Writing 2005. They have aired on NPR.

Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) runs April 7 - May 14, Friday & Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 3pm. The Matthew Corozine Studio Theater is located on the 5th floor of the Times Square Arts Center, 300 W. 43rd St. (at 8th Ave " accessible from the A,C,E,N,R,1,2,3 trains at 42nd Street). Tickets are $18, available at 212-352-3101 or TheaterMania.com.