`Sister’ reveals depth of serious disability> Play a compassionate view of schizophrenia

When someone in the family has a serious disability, no one in the family is beyond the reach of its effect. That’s part of the message Julie Portman tells in the one-woman show “My Sister’s Sister,” which she performed Monday at Hauck Auditorium as part of Mental Health Awareness Week at the University of Maine.

Portman sets the story in the context of her own life growing up in a suburb of New York City. She went to Catholic school, lived through race riots, established herself as a playwright, did a Fulbright in India and now works with her musician husband, Paul Reisler, who composed and performed the live music in the show. Woven into this real-life bio-play is Portman’s younger sister Mary Jo, who went to “the other side of the looking glass” in college, and now, in middle age, lives in a psychiatric hospital near Portman in Virginia.

Although Portman’s focus is her own life, she reveals Mary Jo’s schizophrenia with sensitivity and patience. Mary Jo overdoses on pills, jumps from a fourth-story window, loses job after job, smokes cigarette after cigarette. Through the years, Portman stands diligently by — never judging and trying lovingly to understand the voices and the danger of this brand of mental illness.

Portman’s acting technique is stark and definitive. At her most poignant, she is a natural-born storyteller whose musical cadences and balletic motions are controlled without sacrificing spontaneity. The pacing can sometimes be overly measured, but there’s also a clear artistic vision at work here which can resound in the silence between words. Reisler contributes solid talents in the form of rich percussive sounds and tender string accompaniment.

“My Sister’s Sister” is finally more about Portman than about Mary Jo, but it offers a clearly compassionate view of living in the tricky midst of schizophrenia. The triumph of the show, which has touches of humor, is its fearless and humane confrontation of a topic that too often gets pushed from the realm of family and into the halls of institutional silence.