dependent-personifies-heroin-as-a-siren-esque-figure74687f78fcc661ab9afdff0000724a5f.jpg?sfvrsn=77ae1e8c_0&w=411&dpr=2&auto=compress%2cformat "(In)Dependent Personifies Heroin As A Siren-Esque Figure")
(In)Dependent: The Heroin Project opens as one character relapses and another overdoses. These scenes are highly personal. Kent State University student Emelia Sherin based the play on her own substance use, heroin’s impact on her hometown of Warren and interviews with scores of people affected by the epidemic, words which were often put in the script verbatim. She wrote the play with KSU classmate Zach Manthey in 2017. The docu-theater piece follows Emily and Ryan as they struggle with addiction. Heroin is personified as a siren-esque temptress played by an actress. Now, after two years and seven productions, Sherin directs an expanded update of the play for the Millennial Theatre Project. The group performs the new (In)Dependent Aug. 16 and 17 at the Akron Civic Theatre, where it first premiered in 2017. “Even watching theater, you’re able to be just as vulnerable as the actors,” says Sherin. “You can find a way to relate to anyone.” Here, we break down (In)Dependent’s unusual development and brave new face.
The Inspiration: “We were losing friends, neighbors, classmates,” says Sherin, who was partly inspired after the eighth person from her alma mater, Warren’s Howland High School, died from an overdose. A scripted play was the perfect way to educate audiences about addiction, she says, by finding the humanity in fictional characters based on real-world perspectives. One of those perspectives was her own. Sherin was using cocaine and prescriptions when she started research in September 2016. “Researching this play saved my life, because it taught me the danger I was putting myself in.”The Interviews: To inform the script, Sherin interviewed more than 50 people directly impacted by the epidemic: current and former users, medical professionals, affected families and the CEO of Glenbeigh Center, a treatment facility. “When it came to the way families would describe heroin, it was like it was a jealous girlfriend, keeping people away from their family, changing them in a way where they didn’t even know who that loved one was anymore.” Often, Sherin decided to grant participants anonymity before incorporating their exact words into the script. “The stigma is so strong with addiction that if their name was with it, they think people at work might think of them differently. It’s a shame because that should not be the case.”
The Writing: “I took all of their personalities, experiences and stories, and sewed them into a plot and characters,” says Sherin. She and Manthey wrote (In)Dependent in two days in a Kent apartment. Almost every detail in the play came from interviews or personal experience. In the new version, Sherin revamped monologues into full conversations and deepened character backstories based on past interviews, from a woman who joins the Mormon church during recovery, to a mother who struggles with guilt over using during pregnancy. “I wanted to show more variety and how others would handle, interact and talk to [Heroin].”
The Staging: While the production’s first incarnation was more sparse and minimalistic, the new staging adds a number of vibrant components. Led by Warren musician Stephen Kuhn, a live band performs a new, original funk-infused score, with many of the characters getting their own themes, and drug highs being depicted through rising, throbbing music. This cast also dons face paint and costumes inspired by comics, Sherin says, to reframe the story in the vein of classic archetypes. “You’re your own hero fighting the villain of addiction,“ she says. “But instead of saving a damsel in distress, you’re saving yourself.”
