Vancouver’s Kevin Kraussler and Ming Hudson wrote and perform the show. It alternates between two separate stories and time periods: the first recorded case of schizophrenia, James Matthews, hospitalized in London’s ‘Bedlam’ asylum in the late 18th century and a current story of a delusional woman and her daughter that was drawn from the real-life exposure of the cast.

The play opens with a male physician speaking to our audience as if we were a professional jury. He presents a patient suffering from delusions who has been hospitalized for many years. They are reviewing his mental status in order to...

I mistakenly thought that The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe would be some kind of C.S. Lewis parody, but things are not what they seem at The Vancouver Fringe Festival. The lion in this story is not some omnipotent God-like figure, but Sharon Mahoney’s crippling anxiety. Mahoney shares her own battles with anxiety and panic attacks in her hilarious and deeply personal show The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe. She honestly discusses the stigma around mental health and that no matter how creatively talented, no one is immune to mental illness.

I do not usually enjoy street...

It’s hard to find fault with Michelle(/Ryan) Lunicke’s performance in the autobiographical piece, "Ze": Queer as Fuck! Amidst the political minefield of gender and identity politics, Lunicke’s voice is nothing but pure, personal, and honest to the point of nakedness. Lunicke’s life as presented in "Ze" is a journey from sexual repression to sexual acceptance, from society into the self, and from clarity to confusion and back.

I first encountered the concepts underlying genderqueerness in the book Feminism is Queer by Mimi Marinucci, but it was a different thing to see them unfurl in the fabric of a...