Mental Illness in Crawlspace
In Crawlspace, John, an accused killer, claims to suffer from multiple personality disorder and suggests that an alternate personality, Jack Hanley, is responsible for the murders. This is true to the real-life case the play is based on. While the disorder has since been renamed dissociative identity disorder, the musical is set in the late 1970s and uses the terminology of the time.
While Crawlspace certainly addresses mental illness and the human psyche, the show’s approach is one of exploration—not diagnosis. In life, John proved to be a famously unreliable narrator with an interest in psychology. At the time of his arrest, police found a number of psychology books in his home. Among them was the 1973 book Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber, about a patient who was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (DID in today’s terms). Years later, this book was proven to be a fabricated account. Nonetheless, its popularity led to a surge in diagnoses of the disorder and to widespread misinformation, and the condition became heavily sensationalized.
In Crawlspace, John’s concept of the disorder is also sensationalized and harnessed in a way that reflects his manipulative nature and the cultural climate of the time (not to discount his very real psychological issues). Several of the detectives involved in the Gacy case believed that John, a known showman and conman, had been considering his insanity defense long before his arrest. It should be noted that John Wayne Gacy was never diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Instead, he was classified as having antisocial personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.
John’s simplification of DID, whether from ignorance or to feign insanity, underscores the dangers of misunderstanding and sensationalism. If his views seem insensitive, it’s because that’s true to who he was in life—often insensitive, desperate, conflicted, and troubled. His perspective as a character doesn’t reflect the authors’ views or the show’s message; rather, it’s a tool to tell the story in a truthful manner while clarifying its overarching themes. It is also a vehicle for exploring larger societal and psychological issues.
In the play, when John’s ghostly “multiples” appear as part of his narrative, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways—as true fractures of his psyche, as voices of his conscience personified, as the hallucinations associated with paranoid schizophrenia, as memories brought to life by substance abuse, or simply as a ruse designed to manipulate his captives and caregivers. Their true nature is intentionally left ambiguous; their function is the focus. Here, the term “multiples” doesn’t imply multiple personalities in a clinical sense. Rather, it plays with the idea presented in the famous words of Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes,” from Song of Myself. It’s an attempt to visualize the inner workings of the human mind—clinically fractured or not—and to represent the philosophical notion of human complexity. It is also important to consider that the so-called “multiples” reflect the Doctor’s perception as she works to diagnose John, even as the lines between his psyche and her interpretation become increasingly blurred.
Crawlspace examines John through the lens of the fictional Doctor. Much of what is seen on stage is conjured by her mind as she visualizes events as John has recounted them, filtered through her scientific training and evolving attempts to accurately diagnose him. Throughout the show, she must contend with his unreliable narration as well as her own fears, past experiences, and biases that cloud her objectivity. As the story progresses, John’s “ghosts” mingle with her own, raising the question—were they ever just John’s?
The events of Crawlspace are not meant to depict any particular mental disorder. Instead, they are an attempt to venture into a chaotic psychological space (John’s, the Doctor’s—or both) in search of meaning, factoring in unreliable narratives, misunderstanding, sensationalism, and memory. Crawlspace is meant to pose important, difficult questions and to explore humanity in all its complexity.
The waters are murky. Nothing is black and white. It’s gray matter brought to life.