The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park launches the first of two special engagements next week with the regional premiere of “Low” by hip-hop star and community activist Rha Goddess.

“Low” is the story of Lowquesha, a young woman who is struggling on a journey through the mental health system and her own descent into mental illness.

“It’s done in a contemporary performance of spoken word, poetry and song,” Goddess said. “The soundscape— the sound, the rhythm, the texture and lighting — act as an additional character in the context of the story.

“As diverse as American theater is, I’ve never seen this kind of character on stage before.”
Goddess said that the story was inspired by a series of personal events, having three or four people in her life diagnosed with mental illness.

“I watched whole personalities change,” she said, “and thought ‘This is scary.’”
Even though Goddess is the kind of person her friends and family turn to for support, she said she felt totally useless trying to navigate the health care system, but the severe learning curve compelled her to talk about it.

The tipping point, she said, was the suicide of her mentor, band leader and composer Weldon Irvine in April, 2003.

“I come from the hip-hop era and he really reached out to our community to bridge the gap between the old school and the new,” Goddess said. “He mentored many artists and had a real commitment to our generation and his suicide was shocking. We had no reason to believe he was in distress or suffering from anything.”

Everyone was so shocked, she said, that no one wanted to talk about it, which reinforced her need to facilitate some kind of discussion.

“I wrote a poem and sat on it for six months because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to do this, to open this can of worms,” she said. “That November, I performed at a dance festival. We did a big concert with an eight-piece band. I stopped the music halfway through and read this poem. I wish I could have recorded the audience.

“I knew I need to do this and that it needed to be more than three minutes and 35 seconds. I knew it needed more.”

She embarked on a process of research and development that not only included interviews with people in her life and in the mental health care system, but also a series of community dialogue sessions and a statistical study to explore attitudes and beliefs about mental illness.

“We’d do a 15-20 minute presentation and people wanted to talk about it for an hour and a half,” she said. “People were really telling their stories about how someone’s suicide affected their lives. It was unbelievable. They’d been holding onto these stories for years.

“To have a theater be transformed into a venue to have this kind of dialogue was incredible. We knew early on that we needed to keep the dialogue component in.”

The study, the first of its kind to be conducted in conjunction with a performance piece, will be released soon, she said, but the results indicate a significant shifts in perceptions and attitudes among the people in the audiences of “Low.”

“The most inspiring thing for me is the way the piece is helping to break through the stereotypes, people whose lives suffer and the ways that life is impacted by having to live with and support someone with mental illness.”

how to go
THE NAME: “Low” by Rha Goddess.
THE LOCATION: Shelterhouse Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
THE HOURS: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday; 8 p.m. Jan. 11-12; 4 and 9 p.m. Jan. 13.
THE TAB: $30.
THE PHONE: (513) 421-3888; cincyplay.com.

A version of this story ran in the Go! section of the Journal-News, Hamilton, Ohio.