Frank Talk, with Andy Jones

While mental illness is often the elephant in the room, there is no elephant here today. There is, however, a platypus. 

I am sitting in the kitchen at Andy Jones’ Gower Street home, which the comedian, actor, and writer shares with his wife, St. John’s theatre veteran Mary-Lynn Bernard, and two dogs (one is just visiting, I’m told). I’m here to talk with Jones about his upcoming one-man show, “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad” which opens May 31. 

The show, which Jones also wrote, is about the couple’s son, Louis Elphage Wynn Jones Bernard, a magnanimous, charismatic boy who became a young adult under the duress of a debilitating mental illness. He died by suicide at the age of 28.

When I ask Jones to tell me a little bit more about what the show actually is in terms of format and structure, he can’t quite say–but he isn’t at a loss for words. 

“If it was animal,” he offers, “it would be a duck-billed platypus.” It’s a fine metaphor. The platypus is a mysterious creature, a marvelous amalgam of reptile, bird, and mammal. The show reflects that hybridity. 

“It’s just so many things kind of mixed together,” he continues, searching for other analogies. “If I was a poet, it would be my poem. If I was a concert pianist it would be my concerto…. It’s just a bunch of themes and ideas, some of which recur and come back.” 

After Louis died in 2014, the couple spoke candidly about their son’s battles. They even made the unorthodox decision to include “died by his own hand” in his obituary and requested donations in his name be made in support of mental health organizations. 

Jones admits he hasn’t kept up with advocacy work as much as he’d hoped, but says “talking publicly about the fact that he took his own life right away, seemed to make a difference. It seemed to resonate for a while.” 

It’s been nearly a decade now, and Jones is re-visiting Louis’ story publicly again. This work is a long time in the making. 

Jones has mentioned elsewhere that “don’t give up on me, Dad” is something Louis often said to him. It’s hard not to read the title and imagine hearing the sound of Louis’ voice, persisting like an echo across time. 

Tell It Slant

“I’m kind of talking to the audience with total trust—the kind of way that I would if I was talking to a good friend who had been away and came back and he’d say, ‘What happened?’ So I could say things to him that I wouldn’t say to anyone else. My job as a writer is to share some of that, so I am treating the audience as if they are that.”

While it’s one thing to address the facts of Louis’ death directly, it’s another matter to share everything leading up to it, and after.

“Tell all the truth,” the poet Emily Dickinson once urged, “but tell it slant.” Some things are just too big, too heavy, and too complex to approach head-on. Perhaps that’s why people hesitate to attend to the proverbial elephant in the room–they just don’t know how to approach it.  

Jones solves this problem in the show by coming at it in different ways, from all directions. “This theme comes in, that theme comes in, then it builds to a crescendo because there is a kind of plot within it. That’s all I can say.” Without revealing too much, he fleshes out the edges to give a better sense of its shape.

“I talk a little bit about the kind of experiences Louis had in the system. Again, I’m being very, very circumspect because the more I research, of course, the more I realize I don’t know anything about anything. And it’s very complex,” he says, noting that people working in mental health do the best they can but there are systemic problems. 

“So I kind of tell the story of that,” he continues. “Then I try to tell the story of who Louis is—the good and the bad. I tried not to shy away from some of the bad stories about Louis, and lots of fun stories about Louis, too. Those little themes run through the concerto.” 

It’s not all about Louis either, Jones adds. “I talk about myself and the kind of person I am, and how I was reacting—you know and my background, brought up in the Catholic Church and all those things—and I bring those themes in and I lay them together.”

Jones admits that he’s “stuck on this concerto thing.” It makes sense he’d keep reaching for musical metaphors because music is also hard to pin down. A concerto is a piece of classical music defined by the relationship between a soloist and an orchestra, not unlike an actor has with his audience. 

A Place for Grief

They say grief is just love that has no place to go. “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad” is also Jones’ attempt to give it such a place. 

“I have placed the show somewhere so that there’s actually a kind of plot,” Jones says cryptically, not wanting to give away too much. “I reveal that we are in a certain place. Something is happening in that place. Somehow, that is probably a metaphor for what I’m going through.” 

One of the places he shares is Louis’ apartment on Hayward Avenue. “That’s where, in my mind, I am—that’s where he died—and I find it very hard to get out of that apartment.”

Jones chose the stage to deliver this work into the world. Theatre is his medium, after all. As one of the original co-founders of the Resource Centre for the Arts, the LSPU Hall is also his old haunt. But the man—who was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2019—is well-versed in many media. 

Some of his credits include: the television series CODCO, the film The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, the radio play-turned novel, Letters from Uncle Val, and more recently, an ongoing series of children’s books based on folktales for Running the Goat press (for a brief time, he even wrote for The Indy). Making “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad” into a documentary film or a television series, or publishing it as a memoir, wouldn’t seem like a stretch for Jones; it might have given him access to a larger audience, and extended the work’s life longer than a 12-night run. But he wants to share the story with live audiences. 

“I have a kind of goal in the show where […] I am trying to make something happen for real in the audience that night, with all of us.” In the tradition of oral storytelling, it’s about sharing something personal which gets elevated by the limits of time and space.

“When Louis died, Mary-Lynn’s family all came from the mainland […] we had all her brothers and sisters, cousins and their kids, and we said […] you guys have not been in touch with Louis since he was a little kid. Here’s the story,’” he recalls. “And they got to have that story. In a kind of way, I’m doing that again, with more people […] broadening the circle, the community connection.”

“We were enormously supported after Louis’ death,” Jones adds. “People were extraordinarily kind to us. And we got lots and lots of attention. And people raised money for us, and people brought us food and just generally held our hand in a way that you couldn’t ask for better. I would like to think I am talking to those people who did that for us.”

Making that connection is essential. As Jones sees it, the audience is fundamental to the show and the life and meaning it will have. While he has shared the work with a handful of people already, it won’t really exist until it’s performed on stage before a crowd. 

Whatever the show is or will be, he says, “I don’t quite know until I do it for them.”

Living with the Mystery

As Jones talks about the show as an act of service, I can’t help but think of his history with Catholicism. “I was so deeply affected by the Catholic church,” he says. “I was a believer.” He was a practicing Catholic when he left high school and when he arrived at St. Mary’s University in Halifax. 

“I used to serve mass with the old priests who were still able to celebrate mass in Latin,” he recalls. Jones also studied theology, after which he became increasingly critical of the church. His daring contributions to CODCO are a case in point—especially the sketch that became the tipping point for the TV series’ untimely end. His adaptation of Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” performed as recently as 2017, illustrates that religious hypocrisy remains a creative wellspring for Jones.

Though he no longer buys into the church’s claims to truth, he’s still partial to the religion’s founding principle: love. “I still believe in [it] very much. I think love is obviously the answer to everything,” he says.

For better or for worse, Catholicism was formative in his development as a person and as an artist. If you take religion out of the mass what you’re left with are the essential elements of theatre: a focal practice, a stage and an audience, a shared experience in space and time, and an occasion to reflect on life’s mystery in all its joy and sorrow. 

It’s hard to live with uncertainty. The platypus, if you remember, baffled the Europeans who first encountered it back in 1799. When it arrived as an artifact from Australia, they thought it was a hoax. It couldn’t be real because it didn’t fit into any of the categories they had created to define the world. It unsettled their grip on reality, and everything they thought they knew–until they made up a new category to account for its existence.

Centuries later, we still approach the mystery of otherness this way–especially the mystery of other minds.

When Rene Descartes bequeathed us with that old chestnut, “I think, therefore I am,” he convinced us that thinking was indeed the way out of the dark and into the light. We think, therefore we are—and therefore, we are defined by what and how we think. 

But the mind is a private internal place, inaccessible to others, and impossible to share. As anyone who struggles with their mental health will tell you—if they can—the mind can be the loneliest place in the universe. 

It’s lonelier still when it turns against you, which Louis Bernard knew all too well. “The tragic theme is […] his life, and not his death […] in many ways,” Jones surmises. “I would say unequivocally that he suffered terribly from what is described as intrusive, obsessive-compulsive disorder thoughts, often referred to as ‘Pure O.’ He was tortured.” 

Jones recalls Louis at one point wondering out loud, “Are my thoughts causing children to die in Africa?” Jones didn’t understand. “What, Louis? Why are you thinking that?” he wondered at the time. “And I don’t know—I’m not a psychologist or anything like that—whether that’s what they call schizophrenia, or OCD. I’ve learned that all those things are very loose.” 

His confusion sent him on a journey. But he found that the more he learned, the less he knew. It was hard to find footing. “It’s a swamp,” he says, “like everything now in the world, a swamp of different information coming at us.”

Jones also admits that, initially, it wasn’t easy for him to open up. “I was always on the side of, ‘Get out of bed, Louis! What’s wrong with you, Louis?’” he confesses. “It just took me so long. Other people in the support group were saying, ‘You have to understand that he’s sick!’ Right, right, I forgot that. You know, and I talk about that in the show. I was some of those people who said, ‘No,’ finger wagging.”

“Does your son have to die to [in order for you to] get some empathy towards other people? I don’t think so,” he says. “Maybe that’s what art is. It’s trying to say, you know, without your son dying, could we have a little bit of empathy?” 

Empathy and its Obstacles

People who are suffering from mental illness can really push the limits of our capacity for empathy. This is in large part because mental disorder is invisible, and if it does present itself, it’s often in ways that are incomprehensible to us. When we cannot understand someone, we struggle to relate, and that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

Jones recalls an old classmate of his with a history of mental health struggles. “When I’d see him on the street, I would feel embarrassed—I would feel uncomfortable. You know, I could never mention it—it was a silence about … he was just ‘crazy’ again. Meanwhile, if he’d had his leg cut off, you’d be able to say, ‘How’s the wooden leg?’ or something.” 

The silence around mental illness also often comes from not having the right words to say. Even the words we have are limited. “I always think that I can’t inform people about it because the word ‘illness’ doesn’t really cut it,” Jones says. 

“It’s more that it’s part of us. Very much a part of us. Like OCD is a part—that’s a very important part. You know, you want to check that the stove is off, and you check twice, maybe you check three times. But once you check four or five times then you’re in a little bit of trouble, then you spend the whole day—your whole life is ruined.” 

While we might understand someone’s hypervigilance, once it becomes excessive, our understanding and ability to identify with them might wane. “It’s hard to get out of bed for everybody. Everyone suffers and has extreme pain on this Earth and I don’t care who they are. So you think, ‘I get through it, why can’t that person?’”

Jones reflects on his own mental health as well, referencing a months-long depression-like episode he had as a young man away at university. “But you know, it wasn’t like anything other than this thing visited upon me one day. I don’t know where it came from. And I see that about Louis too, I think. There’s a thing that comes upon you. It just arrives through town and it picks people up and puts them on the wagon with them.” 

People can be besieged by their minds; and when this can’t be explained or rationalized, it’s dismissed. “I suspect it’s something to do with our obsession with work and how work defines you.” The Protestant work ethic is deeply ingrained in our culture, he adds. 

There’s a sense that if people aren’t being productive, they’re being destructive, and they’ll drag everyone else down with them. Being mentally unwell is treated like a personal choice, an indulgence, or a lack of discipline. 

The assumption is that anyone using social supports doesn’t really need them, Jones says. “So here’s people going around saying ‘let’s cut off all those things, no programs, no good housing, and no food banks.’”

Communicating the Incommunicable

By the end of our conversation, we’ve wandered into the philosophy of mental illness and the way it’s been treated in our culture. Jones confesses that he wishes he’d read the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault identified a marked shift in the modern era with regards to how we began relating to people deemed mentally unwell: we stopped talking to them. Instead, we began talking about them and around them. It was out of this silence that psychiatric language was born. In all likelihood, that unspeakable elephant was too. It turns out, it was really just a person all along.

It wasn’t always this way. While things were no cake-walk before, Foucault claims there had been something like a common language shared between so-called “reason and madness.” Even if it was imperfect, even if we faltered and stumbled over our words, there was still a space for connecting and negotiating meaning.

While it’s no longer possible for Jones to communicate with Louis, he’s still trying, as the title of his show demonstrates. “I end up using his life as my raw material—which he never gave me permission for, but I’m just taking my chance,” Jones says.  

“I talk to Louis during the show, I have him down in the front row and I chat with him, and that’s one of the things I say, you know, ‘I’m sorry, I never asked for your permission.’ I guess he always gives the right answer because I’m writing everything.

“‘Don’t worry dad,’ he says, ‘this is yours. You could never ever guess what I would want to say anyway. So don’t worry about it.’” Jones admits he added that part for his own peace of mind. “I wrote that line for myself to justify what I’m doing,” he says, because “some people don’t think that was a good idea. Some people think you shouldn’t do that.” 

On that point, Jones adds, “Louis wanted to do something so much in those last years. And he used to say to me all the time, ‘Dad I want to write the OCD bible’ — like a bible about OCD that would help other people with Obsessive Compulsive disorder.”

And he wrote some stuff down, but he couldn’t get very much together at all. A lifetime’s worth, probably. So I kind of feel a little bit like … I’m not giving up on him.”

Whatever the show ends up being, it’s clearly an effort to communicate something incommunicable. The root of communication is mun—from the word munus, as in “munificent.” It has to do with gifts offered publicly, like those meant to honour the dead. “Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad” is exactly this, a generous offering. If you see the play, let yourself be present to receive it. 

“Don’t Give Up on Me, Dad” is playing at the RCA theatre at LSPU Hall from May 31 to June 11. Tickets are available at the theatre’s online box office. There are pay-what-you-can options available on May 31, June 6, and June 7. There are evening shows, and one matinee on June 4. There are relaxed viewings too. A live stream of the event will be available on June 10.