Don’t Give Up On Me, Dad

By Andy Jones
Tickets available here | LSPU Hall, October 10 to October 20 2024

Reviewed by Alec Brookes

When Louis Jones Bernard died on February 14, 2014 at the age of 28, his parents, Andy Jones and Mary Lynn Bernard, spoke openly about the manner of his death: “Passed away by his own hand after a lengthy and brave battle with mental illness.”

That bravery is palpable, too, in Andy’s decision to perform “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad,” a one-man play that concerns his son’s suicide. His grief is apparent; but while that may be the motivation of the play, it is not its subject. The task of the play, as articulated in the play itself, is to speak the name of the battle that killed his son, and, in so doing, extend our own humanity by counting his son and others who struggle with mental illness among those worthy of social life.

“We’re undone by each other, and if we’re not, we’re missing something” says Judith Butler. And we should be undone by the struggle and eventual death of Louis Jones Bernard. 

To unpack the ways in which people with mental illness are cut out of the fabric of social life, Andy returns to the memory of high school friend Brendan Walsh, who was committed to the Waterford Psychiatric Hospital. As Andy points out, if Brendan was hurt in a debilitating car crash, he would have received flowers, cards expressing sympathy, and hospital visits from his friends. But Brendan did not receive those things. Andy’s story about Brendan is partially about his own accountability, never having visited Brendan himself, but it also serves to make the scope of his play social. If Louis’ plea is “don’t give up on me, dad,” Andy’s plea is for us to not give up on all those waging this battle, a battle that Jones equates to Hamlet fighting an enemy with a poison-tipped sword.  

The play puts forward two ways in which that fight has been ineffectively waged. In his invocations of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of people with mental illness, the church is one. Jones’ concern is partially about the hopelessness of prayer in situations like Louis’. But, in his rehearsals of harm committed by his teachers, the Brothers, that clearly parallel the harm Louis received from his own secular teachers, we are forced to acknowledge that if the project is to expand the circle of who is counted as worthy, of who is counted as human, then the church has no answers. Andy drives this point home by invoking his own bisexuality, which would mark him as unworthy of parenthood in the eyes of the church, and his children a lost cause from the beginning. 

The other way is through the medical establishment. On a sparse stage, “filled with memories but no sunlight,” what stands out in this setting is a door, propped up on two sawhorses. On this makeshift table, lie four bankers’ boxes that contain an archive of Louis’ time within the Eastern Health system. The sixteen-hundred forty-three records, sold to Andy and Mary Lynn for fifty cents a page, detail a history in which the medical system—including doctors who were among the best (at CAMH in Toronto) and kindest (“Dr. Good-and-kind”)—could not name Louis’ mental illness, much less cure it. 

What we are left with is theatre. The one-man show, as a genre, allows Andy a first-person narrative that moves from pathos, to comedy, to intellect. Mary Lynn sits to his left (our right), as assistant stage manager, following along with the script, ostensibly in case Andy misses his lines. The ghost of his son Louis, whom Andy addresses, sits in seat A10, a seat for his coat reserved alongside. And there is us, the audience, watching Andy, sitting behind Louis, next to Mary Lynn, unmediated by screens. It is an intensely intimate experience, where we are invited to witness Louis, Mary Lynn and Andy’s struggles.

While watching the play, too, I recalled the words of poet Adrienne Rich, who wrote that “whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language — this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”

In crafting “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad!” and in bringing it back to the LSPU hall two years after its initial run, Andy has depicted and spoken his son’s unspeakable mental illness through theatre. And we were undone by it, increasing even incrementally the scope of our own humanity, and the humanity of those like Louis, who engage in such lengthy and brave battles.