by

Enrique R. Carrasco

My play is based loosely on a true story. My sister Maria, who lived in Chicago, committed suicide a number of years ago. She had suffered from mental illness most of her life but refused to take medication. I, too, have had to cope with mental illness. I’m bipolar but I take medication.

Shortly after she jumped to her death, I sketched out a vignette of a brother, Juan, and sister, Alicia, enjoying an afternoon in Lincoln Park. It starts as loving exchanges about their roots in Chicago, where most of my eight siblings were born, Michigan, where my mother was born, and Ecuador, where my father was born. But soon the conversation evolves into an argument about decisions to take or not to take medication.

At some point Juan ponders the “what if” question. It’s a universal query. What if British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had not appeased Hitler by allowing him to occupy part of Czechoslovakia. Would that have prevented Hitler from invading Poland and triggering World War II? What if Mr. Abumayyaleh, the owner of a convenience store in Minneapolis, had not instructed a clerk to call the police after George Floyd used a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Would Floyd still be alive? 

In Maria’s case, all of her sibs and her husband had asked the same question: What if any of us had done the one thing, whatever that thing might have been, would Maria still be alive? Juan says that’s a useless question because it calls for the construction of an alternate reality that is beyond our reach. Posing the question only invites anger and despair. The vignette ends with Juan and Alicia accepting who they are and expressing love for each other. The sister, however, no longer exists in reality. Juan is really alone in the park.

Years later, I decided to expand upon the vignette, which led to the creation of IT’S OKAY. The play explores the characters in greater depth while addressing broader issues surrounding Maria’s suicide, such as how we think about pills in our society. Should we respect, rather than look down upon, people with mental illness who for multiple reasons don’t want to be medicated? What about the broader negative externalities beyond an individual’s refusal to take medication, ranging from crippling anguish among surviving family members and friends after a suicide, to mass shootings that in matter of minutes wipe so many people off the face of the earth?

In addition to the issues themselves, I also wanted to create something that was missing in my vignette: a “meta construct” in which the characters exist and interact. It’s based (very) loosely on the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida, who explored the concept of word iterability, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote more broadly about the nature and meaning of language.

By iterability I mean that language isn’t possible without the ability to use the same word in different contexts. Take the word “pass” for example: Pass me the butter. You can pass me on the right. I might not pass the test.

As to Wittgenstein, he argued (in his later work) that the meaning of language is derived through publicly-shared agreements in society on the rules for the usage of a word. The rules create communities of understanding through which life exists. His concept can be applied to, say, rules in a country, a family, a neighborhood, as well as within communities of persons with intersectional identities based on gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, etc. Although we can’t see all of those rules working visibly in the play, they nevertheless exist and give meaning to words that inhabit the world of Juan and Alicia in the park.

My play begins by setting up the meta construct through Juan’s soliloquy on the use and meaning of the word “love” but only introducing the words “it’s okay.” He ends by asking “what about Alicia?” Does she have meaning only because of the meta construct? Can the same question be asked about Juan? Is their relationship as brother and sister more specifically defined by their agreement on rules of their shared language?

I explore these questions in various ways, such as when they talk about the meaning of the words “peaceful” and “acceptance.” Crucially, they grapple with the meaning of “what if,” the words Juan spoke disdainfully of in the vignette, not only in their broad significance but also as they relate to their lives, both as individuals as well as brother and sister. As their argument over medication heats up, Alicia asks, “why are we here?” Is she asking, why are we here in the park? Why are we here in terms of the evolution of our relationship as informed by our life-long use of words between us? Why are we here as individuals, each using words to get what we need from each other?

The play takes a profound turn in meaning when Alicia asks Juan why he didn’t call her while she was hospitalized due to a serious mental breakdown. She says that Juan is the “one person who could understand me. Understand my world. Our world.” Is she saying they were bound by the meaning of words she and Juan had shared when talking about mental illness? Juan protests that she is “breaking the rules.” What rules are those? The rules they’ve created as to the use of their shared language? The rules of the older brother dictating which meanings between them should be privileged over the other? The rules that governed their encounter(s?) in the park?

Alicia then asks the critical question, the question Juan has avoided since her suicide: What if you could change one thing that would prevent catastrophe? Only because of iterability and rules of meaning can we see that she’s using the words in a context that differs vastly from Juan’s use of them when he first posed the question. 

Alicia persists in her questioning despite Juan’s protestations. “Say it” she says lovingly. He finally relents, saying, “I should’ve called.” There is great meaning in his utterance but it isn’t, for instance, “I should’ve called to make a reservation.” Alicia finally brings Juan to his cathartic reckoning by saying “Alicia” is “a simple word. I just wanted to hear you say my name, speak it, into my world, dear brother.” The word “Alicia” would be meaningless if it didn’t belong to a language with publicly-shared rules on word use. But here we can see it is profoundly meaningful in so many ways. 

The play ends with Juan once again delivering a soliloquy on iterability and language. Words can be used brutally, he says. But what if there are no words? Would we lose everything that has meaning to us? Would we cease to exist? Juan thinks so: There would only be a “wordless abyss.”

The play ends with Juan returning to the words, “it’s okay” and their iterability, such as “it’s okay, I suppose” or “it’s okay, it’s good to go.” He then hears a whisper of his sister’s spirit. She say, ‘It’s okay to feel the trauma of grief, it’s okay to feel the pain of letting go, it’s okay to fear the future without me.” And she promises Juan that there will be better days to come.

In words of assurance that he will survive her suicide, she says, “Words, Juan, what you will speak tomorrow because you will be there.” Alicia is saying to Juan, and to all of us who struggle to survive the suicide of a loved one, that by speaking words we will be alive to the world, engaged in life through language and love.