Before the Drugs Kick In

You’re nine years old, and your mother has just taken a kitchen knife and slashed her wrists. What would you do? What Mike Lemme did—twenty-four years later—was “turn a bad memory into a piece of art.”

Before the Drugs Kick In is a one-hour monologue in his mother’s voice: that of a 62-year-old woman in a mental hospital. Her children don’t visit; so she copes with that sad reality by taking on the persona of a young standup comedienne doing a set for an audience, while she waits for her antipsychotic meds to do their work.

Maria DeCotis, who’s 30-something, does the mic-in-hand standup routine. It works best when it draws on suburban angst (“You can’t walk anywhere.”) and on giving up a career for motherhood (“A baby shower is a retirement party.”). But too often it veers into self-pity (“It wasn’t a suicide attempt, it was a mistake!”), and an awkward attempt to equate her psychosis with—as she sees it—the “madness” of Woody Allen marrying his girlfriend’s daughter. The night I saw the show, the routine drew very few laughs. 

Maria DeCotis doing standup in Before the Drugs Kick In

In a Q&A session afterward, Lemme acknowledged that the wrist-slashing really happened when he was nine, and that “No one told me how to deal with it.” He turned to doing stand-up comedy at age 14 to channel his anger and, subsequently, to writing autobiographical theater pieces. In response to a question that was probably in everyone’s mind, he said his mother “isn’t happy” that he’s bringing it all up in public.

Guided by Movement Director Mandy Gordon, DeCotis not only stands up but strolls around, leans in toward the crowd, and withdraws catatonically into a chair. Lemme is the playwright, director and producer; he also runs the sound-and-light board and takes tickets at the door.

The play was presented at the Edinburgh (Scotland) Festival Fringe. It runs through Dec. 22 in its present location, and Lemme said it will “move to Queens” in January.

Top photo: Maria DeCotis and Mike Lemme take questions from the audience at the conclusion of his play, Before the Drugs Kick In

Photos by Arin Sang-urai

Before the Drugs Kick In
Under St. Marks Theater
94 St. Marks Place, between First Avenue and Avenue A.
Note: the theater space is in a basement that is not ADA accessible.