Paul McComas felt like he had to do something positive after Kurt Cobain’s suicide. McComas, a video and performance artist, created a Nirvana tribute band called Lithiumand decided to stage a benefit concert series called Rock Against Depression (RAD).
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“The goal is youth outreach,” says McComas, who’s 34. He hopes the concerts have sent a message that Cobain’s suicide was not about the burden of stardom or about drug abuse or about any of the myriad reasons why people think he killed himself. “This was a person with a serious illness–clinical depression.”
His latest one-act play, Now I Know My ABCs, depicts a young woman’s struggle with schizophrenia and her brother’s struggle to understand her. McComas doesn’t have a sister with schizophrenia, but people still think the work is intimately connected to his real life. “Every time we do this piece, people come up to me and ask, “How’s she doing?’ The story is not literally true, it’s emotionally true. It really seems to hit a chord of a fairly common experience.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J.B. Spector.
