AddictShunned
by Judith Austin
at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, July 12-28
AddictShunned, a new play by Judith Austin, is a collection of compelling and brutally honest monologues on the topics of addiction and recovery. A variety of characters, from patient to clinician to active user, relate their experience with a mix of humor and pain, wisdom and irony. Thoroughly grounded in our time and place, where addiction touches virtually every life regardless of age, class, or culture, AddictShunned is a plea for understanding and dialogue from the front lines of a crisis.
Judith Austin, a Psychiatric Nurse-Practitioner specializing in addictions, began working on AddictShunned in late December of 2016. Prior to pursuing her career in healthcare, Judith earned her B.A. in Theatre Arts from University of Massachusetts, Boston, and has performed in numerous plays in and around Boston. The process of creating AddictShunned began through her interactions with patients in the acute detoxification units she works in. These conversations have covered the spectrum of human emotion, from side-splitting hilarity to bone-shaking sorrow, sometimes overt, oftentimes subtle. The constant theme in each of these conversations has been, “I don’t want to be this way.” With that in mind, she started to create characters based on these interactions.
There are a myriad of reasons why addictions take hold. Sadly, Judith regularly finds herself having to defend both her role as provider (“How can you work with those people?”) and the plight of her patients (“Why don’t they just stop?”), even to healthcare providers who do not work in the field of substance use disorders, and, as a result, don’t fully understand it. The goal of AddictShunned is to offer a brief glimpse into that odyssey, to demonstrate that there are many paths to addiction, from a commonplace injury to a subtle, or untreated, mental health issue. Using a variety of characters, Ms. Austin hopes her audience finds themselves saying, “There but for the grace of God…” or “I know that person/I was that person/I treat that person”, and thereby stimulate new ideas, new conversations, and perhaps a new way of addressing the devastating effects and stigma of addiction. At times heart-wrenching, cruel, and funny, AddictShunned shows us the humanity of those afflicted and, drawing upon Ms. Austin’s professional experience, the playwright hopes to entertain, educate, and involve her audience in this crisis.
AddictShunned was originally titled Spiro Spero, which roughly translates to “While I Breathe, I Hope”.