Michael Mack brings his acclaimed one-man show
"Hearing Voices" (Speaking in Tongues) to Chelmsford
Saturday, May 22, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.

For over a decade, Boston-based solo performer Michael Mack has been preaching a kind of gospel. The good news? His mother's recovery from schizophrenia, as told in his one-man play Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues).

Mack was five years old when his mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and his 90-minute performance chronicles her decades-long odyssey through psychosis into redemption. Directed by Daniel Gidron, this award-winning production has played nationwide at venues that include the US Library of Congress, the Harvard Medical School, and Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center.

Written in collaboration with his family, Mack's multi-character monologue gives voice to his mother and the voices that haunt her, as well as his father and other family members as they navigate a devastating reality. The play 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, Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) is one family's journey of deliverance.

Michael Mack graduated from the Writing Program at MIT and has performed at the US Library of Congress, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Columbia Festival of the Arts, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Austin International Poetry Festival, and Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center. His work has aired on NPR, and has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, and is featured in Best Catholic Writing, both in 2005 and 2007.

Mack has also performed at scores of venues for consumers and providers of mental health services, including McLean Psychiatric Hospital, the national conference of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and for faculty and students of the Harvard Medical School and Yale Medical School.

Awards include an Artist's Grant for new theater works from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, First Prize in the Writers Circle National Poetry Competition, and an Eloranta Fellowship, which funded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts in Ireland.

Check out Michael Mack's website at http://www.michaelmacklive.com/

This "One Book Chelmsford" program is sponsored by the Chelmsford Library and the Lowell Poetry Network and funded by the Chelmsford Friends of the Library.