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It’s a thing of beauty when a heartrending script meets the perfect actor. Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness is Sharon Scott Williams‘ memoir about growing up with a mother who began suffering from paranoid schizophrenia before effective medication was available. Williams’ stage adaptation, directed by her husband Anson Williams, is now at 59e59 Theaters in a terrific performance by a mesmerizing Linda Purl.
Purl narrates and dramatizes Williams’ life with and without her mother beginning when Sharon was eight. That’s when her 30-year-old mother began hearing voices, hallucinating, and lashing out violently, resulting in her first hospitalization. For much of the play, Purl embodies a girl of eight and nine while also bringing to life a volatile but good-hearted father, various memorable family members, and most jarringly, her disturbed mother.
Will Huse feelingly plays and sings short, bluesy musical interludes that mark divisions between incidents and time periods. They form a symbolic frame and provide the only breaks for the hardworking Purl. The rest of this production is all Purl, who employs affect and body language to draw a whole “cast,” spellbindingly evoking the memoir’s important events and their crushing, prodding effects on little Sharon.
Williams stripes her script with arch humor. Her illness-stricken Southern family is no stranger to “lost causes.” Men possessed a “golden chromosome” that kept women in their place; little girls certainly never beat up little boys. There are two kinds of cures: good as new, and “good as you’re gonna get.” These sparkles humanize the story and lighten it just enough – it’s a sad, sad tale. And just when you think Williams has closed the book on the memoir, she jumps ahead from the 1950s to 2003 and a brilliantly played death scene that’s so devastating it’s hardly bearable.
Love does triumph, in a small but shining way, in the end. But the epilogue drives home another of the play’s messages too: that the availability of effective drugs to treat schizophrenia doesn’t necessarily make everything all better for sufferers and their families. A combination of psychology and mental illness (and possibly side effects, but we’re not told about them in the modern context) drove Williams’ mother to refuse not only the crude medicines given her 70 years ago but the much better ones developed later in the 20th century, depriving Williams and her brother of their mother for the better part of a lifetime.
Through Sharon Scott Williams’ artful writing and Purl’s magical performance, Williams’ story speaks to anyone who has ever loved a parent or a child. And it’s one of the best (more-or-less) solo shows I’ve seen in ages.
Crazy Mama is at 59e59 Theaters through October 18, 2026.
