“[Y]ou think you’re dying. But you’re not,” begins Ben Kassoy’s poem “The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack.” His one-man show of the same title, which ran at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for the Arts on Friday, September 19, opened with a recorded reading of the poem. And the poem is funny — so is the show. In the end, however, the most affecting moments of The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack generated a sort of embodied, kinesthetic empathy between audience and performer through which we collectively experienced how mental illness or trauma manifests as an occasionally terrifying physical sensation.  

Kassoy and his director, Joanna Simmons, have structured the show as a mash-up of a few different forms. Part comedy routine, part literary reading, part dance and part improvisational theater, its generic multiplicity created narrative instability. At every turn, Kassoy exploited that instability to undermine the audience’s certainty about which aspects of his performance were set and choreographed, which were improvised and which may have been emerging in that very moment as a spontaneous mental health crisis.

For example, during the opening sequence, Kassoy performed in silence to his recorded poetry reading. The audience listened to and could not help but laugh along with his past recorded self in response to lines such as, “Over your shoulder, you hear your roommate spelling your last name to the biggest hottest [paramedic] of the bunch, who’s wearing suspenders like a firefighter-themed stripper.” At the same time, on a semi-darkened stage in front of us, Kassoy slowly sank into a chair, visibly withdrew inward and clutched his skull.

Employing movement, spoken word, theater and a touch of stand-up, Ben Kassoy’s storytelling captivated the audience in his September performance.

He then exited slowly, his hands covering his face, only to re-emerge moments later under brighter lighting, wearing a jaunty knit beanie and cracking inside jokes about Emory University with the large contingent of faculty, students and alumni in attendance.

From the outset, therefore, Kassoy hinted that his poetry may be more lyric than confessional, less an outpouring of the soul than a carefully crafted and stylized self-fashioning. With the Emory bit, he suggested that — though this performance was one of many — it was also a singular event, made for this evening and this venue in collaboration with Emory-based artists. Dance faculty Julio Medina and Gregory Catellier created the choreography and lighting design, respectively.

Although The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack is a one-man show, Kassoy was not the only character contributing to the story. His sister, whom he took pains to reassure the audience is still very much alive, made an appearance in Kassoy’s recollections of their relationship and in another recorded monologue. During the after-show talk back with Medina, Kassoy said that sitting in a chair onstage and listening to the recorded opening of her comedy stand-up routine — or “stood up” routine as she calls it because, so she says, she was stood up by a date just before the performance — is one of his personal favorite moments as a performer. “I’m sitting there listening to her and thinking to myself, ‘They [the audience] have no idea what’s coming,’” said Kassoy.

Kassoy also introduced another character, his mother, with a personalized ringtone — a kitschy digital flip-phone cover of Abba’s “Mamma Mia.” When he answered the phone, the audience heard his mother’s voice in another recording. He takes her call during the show, he explained, because if she calls and he doesn’t answer, she worries, and then he worries about making her worry. “We’re Jewish,” he said knowingly, eliciting a presumably equally knowing laugh from the audience.

Kassoy’s relationship with his mother became yet another example of how his show subverts conventions — this time, however, around cultural and social identity. In another recording, Kassoy’s mother expressed feelings of guilt at being the “cause” or “source” of his panic attacks; not because she was a stereotype of the overbearing, guilt-tripping Jewish mother figure but because sometimes mental illness, like many other types of illness, runs in families. Psychology — like physiology — is a complicated mix of nurture and nature. 

Indeed, far from haranguing him into a state of escalating anxiety, within The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack, Kassoy’s mother — who was present in the audience for this particular show and whom Kassoy invited to join him onstage for an ovation afterward — was a relatively grounded, sympathetic and highly self-aware character. As Medina noted during the talk back, Kassoy himself was the one putting someone — the audience — through a sometimes uncomfortable social encounter.

One of the forms mashed up in the performance was dance, and The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack was a social dance that ranged from the cringeworthy awkwardness of a junior high cotillion to the joyful commingling of amateurs and virtuosos at a street-dance cypher. Kassoy led, and the audience followed.

Kassoy explained during the talk back that he has been dancing, both in classes and performances, since he was a child. “I didn’t do all that performing because I was good, though,” he said. Rather, he performs because, even though he hates nearly every minute of preparation, while he is onstage and in the moments immediately after, he experiences a “lightness” — a physical and mental euphoria.

Medina’s choreography for The Funny Thing About a Panic Attack did not provide the audience with an opportunity to judge whether Kassoy’s assessment of his own technical abilities is accurate. It did, however, showcase Kassoy as a more-than-competent break- and hip-hop performer and as someone who moves with the heightened spatial, temporal and physical awareness of a lifelong dancer. Kassoy leveraged that ability to drive home the point that, during a panic attack, you think you’re dying because you feel, in your body, like you’re dying.

Further, by keeping the dance technique and the forms themselves accessible to a general theater-going audience, Kassoy and Medina sustained the show’s overall thematic concern with anxiety and other types of mental illness as a fact — as opposed to a consequence — of life for many people: something relatively normal that can be managed and dealt with, rather than something exceptional to be expunged, regardless of the cost.

In Something Funny About a Panic Attack, connection — to our own embodied senses and to one another — is simultaneously source and solace for anxiety. Rather than pessimism about the human condition, however, the show expresses a tentative faith in the healing potential of shared experience, whether it’s a phone call from one’s mother or sitting in the dark with a group of strangers and watching a piece of performance art.

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