Stage Listings

Reviewed by Robert Avila, for the San Francisco Bay Guardian
December 12, 2006

Big Pharma, Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 826-5750, 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-22. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 11. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac — all bywords for an age that has internalized social disequilibrium as a personal crisis in mental health, an age that might be called, in playwright-performer Jennifer Berry's apt phrase, the Great Anti-Depression, characterized by the $120 million a year the industry spends on advertising. Berry's 75-minute solo show — which ably tacks back and forth between a smug if friendly advertising exec's frank explication of industry strategy and the playwright's own account of a small circle of friends disappearing into medicated stasis — charts the rise of antidepressants and the concomitant fall of a generation of thirtysomething women, the number one target market (followed closely by children) for a pharmaceutical industry pushing a plethora of psychotropic drugs addressing an increasing variety of conditions. In the process (and despite a certain monotony in staging and visuals both dimly illuminated and drearily perfunctory in appearance), Berry and director Heidi Rose Robbins offer up a scathing critique of pharmacological capitulation to real-world problems, forcefully arguing for reclaiming our own distress in the name of true personal and social healing.