When I found out that Chemistry, the play I recently attended as part of the Fringe Encore Series, was about mental illness, I was apprehensive at best. Through experiences with family and friends, I understand mental illness firsthand, am all too aware of the dangerous and false stigmas that are still alive and well, and am always cautious about how I see it depicted in pop culture and art. But as the lights dimmed and the show began, my unease quickly faded and I discovered exactly why the play was rewarded with an Overall Excellence in Playwriting Award from the 2014 Fringe Festival and chosen to come back for an extended run.

In its modest hour time frame, Chemistry forgoes complicated set design and focuses the brunt of its force on a carefully paced plot which blends humor with tragedy to create subtle and masterful character development, a testament to the playwright, Jacob Marx Rice. Rice tells the story of boy meets girl, and the relationship that develops between them. But this meet-cute quickly veers from tradition, taking place in the waiting room of a therapist's office between Steph, the sarcastic depressive who's been around the block, and Jamie, the brilliant but manic overachiever who has never even seen a prescription before, let alone the cocktail of pills his doctor prescribes. Together they navigate their own personal challenges while falling for each other. We learn about them through scenes from their relationship, mostly played on the big bed, the one real set piece, that they share night after night. We also learn about their pasts and their experiences throughout the romance through personal moments of narration in which Steph and Jamie address the audience directly, aware of the other's presence and yet somehow lost in a no man's land.

As Steph and Jamie, Lauren Larocca and Jonathan Hopkins are fearless and unabashedly honest and intimate, both with each other and with the audience. Steph is all too familiar with mental illness, and her life has been a series of suicide attempts and endless cycles of medicine and doctors. Jamie is ushered into her life and his own personal experience with mental illness after his escalating mania drives him to self-harm and a diagnosis of Unipolar Mania. Steph sums it up in her usual, quippy manner, "the manic and the depressive. A pair so perfect they named a disease after us." In this way, the play is as light as it can be with a heavy subject matter, and just like real life, it's not one note emotionally. It's funny, sad, joyous, maddening, and unflinchingly real. Ultimately, especially for those who have never come into close contact with mental illness (though Rice points out in the program that it's very unlikely not to know someone who has or is struggling), Chemistry is simply relatable as a play about love, and the ways we change ourselves and ask our partners to change when in a relationship. Steph and Jamie are two young people trying to make a living and imagine a future for themselves. They drink, read together, congratulate each other on good sex: things any couple falling in love would do. And yet, the twist: they are both battling brains that are hell bent on destroying them. Jamie, with his Harvard degree and high powered job, has complete faith that one day he will become Secretary of State. What he can never fully grasp is that to Steph a dream like that is laughable, because every day for her is a battle against such severe depression it's a fight to stay alive.

The play isn't easy to watch. Steph and Jamie grapple with their unusual brain chemistry and how it changes the way the they fit onto their families, friendships, and workplaces. And it becomes clearer and clearer that there are no easy answers, about diagnosis, treatment, even about acceptance and understanding, personally and for those we care for. It's a classic story of tragic love, with an added chemical imbalance, in which Rice strikes a nuanced balance in his discussion of mental illness. Mental illness doesn't define who a person is, and yet, if ignored and misunderstood, like any illness, there can be dire consequences.