Victoria Maxwell is a creative actress who can make you laugh. She’s also a self-described “bi-polar princess” with a creative take on mental health.
These days she travels the continent, though her home is in Halfmoon Bay. She performs her one-woman plays, leads workshops, and makes presentations to companies. She can give audiences some insight into mental illness based on her own experience that sent her into her first psychotic episode when she was just 25. Being bi-polar means undergoing periods of mania, depression and extreme changes in behaviour. Many people suffer from it and they have learned to hide it. Maxwell is in recovery and believes that mental health is possible for everyone.
She notes that though it’s off to a slow start, some corporations are now realizing that their bottom line is being affected by their staff’s mental health. One of her speaking engagements was at 5:30 a.m. in front of business managers. It was worth it, she said. That company wanted to reduce sick days for those suffering from depression or other mental illness and they also wanted to have other employees realize what co-workers might be going through.
“Usually silence is worse,” she said. “It compounds the stigma.”
Recently she returned from a fundraising lunch in Florida for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grassroots mental health education and support organization, where she read excerpts from her play. She has written three – all of them with “crazy” in the title. Her latest is That’s Just Crazy Talk, and currently a theatre troupe is studying it with interest.
There is a healing element to humour – Maxwell has found this out through her own struggle with mental illness.
“A joke helps ‘make friends’ with the trauma,” she said. She counts Coast performer, story-teller and humorist David Roche as a friend and mentor.
Although she’s doing good work in all these directions, Maxwell wants to broaden her reach. She is a trained actor who has had some good teachers. In her acting days, she had small roles in TV shows such as The X-Files (1995), 21 Jump Street (1990) and MacGyver (1989) working opposite stars. She learned how to feel confident on stage. Everyone has a story, she points out; it’s a question of unlocking the creativity and finding your voice so you can tell that story on stage or simply tell it to yourself. She has developed a workshop – or in this case a playshop – designed to unlock creativity and courage with exercises, improvisation, writing and stories. It’s for everyone: actors, entrepreneurs, authors or anyone who needs to improve confidence in public speaking or communicating with friends and family. It’s all about getting the inner critic out of the picture.
“I want participants to get comfortable with what they have,” she said. “Whatever makes you uniquely you, that’s where the magic is.”
The first playshop is in Vancouver on Feb. 13 then Maxwell returns to the Coast to lead a group on Saturday, Feb. 20 from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Davis Bay Community Hall. Your take-away will be the ability to step outside of your comfort zone, find a better way of expressing yourself and maybe draft a fictional or true story that you can develop into a talk, if you wish. Fee is $100.
To register, and for more information, see www.victoriamaxwell.com or phone 604-885-7465.
