THE MUST LIST: Catastrophic Theatre Isn’t Out to Cure Beautiful Princess Disorder

Kathy Ng’s world premiere pairs the cartoonish with the concrete for an unforgettable exploration into mental health, the power of friendship, and existence itself.

Houstonia’s The Must List tells you about something going on in Houston that you absolutely cannot miss.

IN THE PARKING LOT OF HEAVEN, Mother Teresa and Tilikum, the orca who killed three people during his captivity, confer next to a wood-paneled station wagon. Nearby, a triangle-headed humanoid in an old-fashioned swimsuit shrieks and furiously crysturbates against a cloud.

Teresa and Tilikum help their id-motivated, childlike friend during this moment of existential turmoil, as Triangle Person comes to terms with their true nature. Because in the parking lot of Heaven, all they have is one another. God’s too busy hanging out in the mall food court next door, asking his child to maybe write something normal for a change. He hasn’t exactly forsaken the trio as they await the transition to a glorious afterlife. Forsaking requires him to care in the first place.

Advertised as a “sibling drama for the only child,” Kathy Ng’s world premiere play Beautiful Princess Disorder at Catastrophic Theatre presents imaginative material tackling issues of mental illness, family dynamics, and penance from a fresh perspective. This makes the show, open through December 13, well suited to the long-running, pay-what-you-can troupe, which has always shone brightest when tackling avant-garde, absurdist, or otherwise deeply experimental fare.

Ng recently graduated with an MFA in playwriting from Brown University, and began crafting Beautiful Princess Disorder while developing an origin story for the sharp-sided original character they once scribbled as a child. “Shapes can be the language of memory…I remember my childhood mostly in shapes,” they say.

The play also provided Ng, a Hong Kong–born only child who now resides in Rhode Island, an opportunity to examine the circumstances that led them to grow up without siblings. Within the text itself, they hypothesize about what their life might have been like if their parents had decided to have another kid. The result is a collision between the works of Cuban avant-garde playwright María Irene Fornés—whom Ng cites as their inspirational “North Star”—and the candy-coated surrealist dangers of Pendleton Ward’s animated series Adventure Time.

It was Ng’s unapologetic, wholehearted commitment to experimental storytelling that caught Catastrophic’s attention. Playwright Lisa D’Amour, who taught Ng at Brown and had a premiere of her own work at Catastrophic this past April with Frozen Section, introduced the troupe to Ng’s writing. Catastrophic cofounder and director Jason Nodler felt instantly enamored of Beautiful Princess Disorder. “It did everything that we would like for a Catastrophic play to do,” he says. “If I [were] still playwriting, as I had for many years after graduating school, this would be the kind of play I would like to have written.”

Before the November 21 premiere, Ng visited Houston three times during the production process, engaging in a back-and-forth with the Catastrophic cast and crew to make the story feel more like a community effort. Ng notes that scenic designer Matt Fries suggested parking a station wagon in Heaven’s lot, which ultimately became a setting for major moments in the play. The playwright loved the idea so much that they even rewrote scenes around the car. “I realized these are all relentless, passionate, highly collaborative artists, and that’s what I love best. So, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to make the play that we’re meant to make together,’” Ng says.

T Lavois Thiebaud, who plays Triangle Person, says getting to know Ng and their mindset was “one of the coolest parts of the process.” With a title referencing internet slang for borderline personality disorder (BPD), Beautiful Princess Disorder bursts with allusions to the diagnosis. Both Thiebaud and Nodler believe writing like Ng’s can nurture compassion for the oft-stigmatized and misunderstood condition without resorting to stereotypes or melodrama when it comes to mental health. “I’m somebody who has a personality disorder and loves people who do, and so it’s something that I’m familiar with,” Thiebaud says. “It was really cool to be able to show this play, which demonstrates a lot of examples of borderline personality disorder without actually putting a name on it.”

Even for those unfamiliar with BPD, there’s still plenty of resonance within Beautiful Princess Disorder. As funny and bright as the stage is—full of the softest clouds and whiz-bang energetic projections—a profound heartache flows beneath the trio trapped outside Heaven. The characters live in a perpetual state of liminality, awaiting summons from the angels (voiced by Ng) to finally cross over into an afterlife. Tilikum, the orca played with sparkle-eyed enthusiasm by Catastrophic mainstay Kyle Sturdivant, must reconcile his animal instincts with human moral codes. Can he really be labeled a murderer when he was a captive creature who can’t fully fathom how we bipeds operate? Amy Bruce delivers a brittle, bitter portrayal of Mother Teresa as a woman unable to confront her worldly sins. She stews over how her virtues weren’t sufficient to override her mistakes in God’s esteem.

And then there’s Triangle Person, a humanoid character springing from Ng’s fixation with shapes. The ambiguity of their circumstances “really freed me up to be able to show the full range of human emotions in a character, instead of maybe a subset of emotions that a character is comfortable portraying…. We kind of got a free rein of all the emotions,” Thiebaud says.

No spoilers, but Thiebaud dashes across the stage with a whimsical, uncanny energy that balances the endearing with the slightly sinister. Think Pee-wee Herman: utterly harmless and innocent, but just a touch off-balance in a way that puts horror genre–savvy viewers on edge, waiting for the moment a character unhinges their jaws and swallows a grown man (or, in this case, a fancy dolphin and a nun) whole. But in the end, Triangle Person, like Tilikum, simply doesn’t square with the fundamentals of humanity. They spend the show lecturing the audience about swimming techniques, staging their own slice-of-life sitcom, and dry-humping set pieces seemingly more to calm themself down rather than as a means of seeking sexual release, because they aren’t beholden to the morals of a species they don’t fully belong to. Only once they’re finally able to unleash their vice-gripped anger at the world can they quell the chaos roiling both within and without.

Beautiful Princess Disorder’s release also occupies a curious space in the theater’s overarching season. The play premiered a little over a month after Catastrophic’s take on Endgame by Samuel Beckett, also directed by Nodler, closed on October 11. The shows share thematic overlaps that, when viewed in succession, examine similar emotional terrain in vastly different ways. Beyond the limited cast and singular setting, they contend with the tolls the mind and body endure when trapped. Endgame takes place in a crumbling home after the apocalypse, where going outside ensures doom. In Beautiful Princess Disorder, the characters await heavenly judgment, beset by the angels’ periodic reminders to stay put for processing. Where Beckett is decrepit and dark, Ng is the full color wheel. Where Beckett is despairing, Ng allows a few beams of light to shine through the cloud cover. Be they a triangular being or a killer whale, whether living inside a station wagon, an easy chair, or a trash bin, characters in both works convey that an endless loop of waiting for an unknown fate can make a person start thinking and acting in absurd ways to cope with the ever-expanding anxiety. It underscores that, ultimately, the escape may not provide the catharsis sought after all.

Nodler didn’t intend to challenge theatergoers with the double feature, he says. Catastrophic has always been “a make-your-own meaning theater,” where the direction deliberately opens itself up to various interpretations and critical analysis. Beautiful Princess Disorder and Endgame both fit neatly into that schematic. “We are not so…arrogant as to believe that we have the answers,” Nodler says. Catastrophic’s work lies, instead, in asking “a lot of life’s great questions.” The answers are up to the audience.