You've seen the ads.

There's the one of the thirtysomething mother sitting in a dark room looking defeated. She opens the blinds just a crack, letting a beam of light in, and a look of serenity washes over her face.

There's the one of the blonde, pony-tailed athlete running through a dark, gloomy-looking tunnel. She reaches the end and the sun shines down, turning her expression from panicked to perky.

They all end the same:

"Why feel like this another minute?" they ask. "Talk to your doctor today to see if a free trial is right for you."

That troubles Jennifer Berry.

Four years ago, the Boulder playwright and performer began noticing a flurry of video, magazine and newspaper ads targeting women who looked a lot like her for an array of anti-depressants. Around the same time, many of her thirtysomething friends started confiding that they'd turned to pills to help combat their own mood swings. She doubted it was a coincidence and began researching what she saw as a growing problem for her generation.

Come Friday, Berry will unveil the product of four years of research in a one-woman multi-media theater production, "Big Pharma," which takes aim at both the proliferation of anti-depressants to quell everything from depression to PMS and the direct-to-consumer marketing that she believes is driving the trend.

"I was frightened and alarmed by what I was seeing, and I wanted to conceptualize the problem," Berry says. "I didn't want to see another woman who looked just like me being marketed to."

Berry, who has never taken anti-depressants her self, is quick to point out that her show is not an indictment of those who do. "I don't want to stigmatize people who have made that choice," she says.

Rather, she says, it is meant to prompt discussion about how women are portrayed in advertisements for drugs, whether those ads may be driving hasty decisions, and how Prozac and other antidepressants are shaping her generation.

She says she interviewed more than 20 people for the production, including several close friends who take anti-depressants and three executives from pharmaceutical companies. In her performance, she takes on the persona of many of those people as print and TV ads flash behind her.

"I am the face of generation X," she said, during a recent rehearsal. "...We were the generation that was told 'Don't do drugs' in the '80s only to be told 'Ask your doctor for this ... Do drugs in the 90s.'"

Berry is particularly critical of TV ads for drugs, which have proliferated since the late 1990s when the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its regulations on direct-to-consumer advertising. According to a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, more than $2.4 billion was spent on direct-to-consumer ads in 2000, representing a three-fold increase from 1996.

Meanwhile, the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac has exploded. According to Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, more than 40 million people have used Prozac since it was approved for use in the United States in 1987.

And now, Berry points out, there are drugs for depression during menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and much more.

"Throughout history, women have been labeled as insane," she says, pointing to the centuries-old "disease" of hysteria, which is almost always associated with women.

Berry is quick to point out that the vast majority of direct-to-consumer ads for antidepressants are aimed at thirtysomething women, like herself, who logically tend to be dealing with the challenging combination of new motherhood, career, and hormone changes all at once.

National figures suggest the ads may be working.

Women are twice as likely as men to experience a major depressive episode, according the American Psychological Association, and approximately 70 percent of the prescriptions for antidepressants are given to women.

What's the alternative? Berry recalls a conversation she once had with her grandmother, who lived through the Great Depression.

"When I asked her how she got through it, she said she always carried a white handkerchief in her sleeve because she never knew when someone would need it," recalls Berry. In essence, people cried on each other's shoulders back then, she says.

"We've gone from her generation with a white handkerchief in her sleeve to our generation with a bottle of Prozac in our purse. I want to know what happened," she says. "I don't have any answers, but I hope this performance raises a lot of questions."