The Story So Far

Crazy People Incorporated features Susan; a retired therapist and social worker, who has befriended Melissa, the subject of the story and one of Susan's former clients.

Melissa is a survivor of sustained emotional and sexual absue, primarily at the hands of her father and an uncle. In her early teens she was involved in the creation of child pornography, and also hired out as a prostitute. She finally broke free of her family when her father died just as her teenage years were coming to a close.

Melissa spent most of her twenties continuing to work as a prostitute, and it was during this period that she developed the theory that her body must be co-inhabited by several other people besides herself, as it became ever more necessary to rely on drugs and alcohol to numb the disturbing voices that had been murmouring away in the background for as long as she could remember.

By the time she was thirty, her anger and resentment at the world in general was so great that even the hardened core of the local BDSM community had turned their back on her, and Melissa took to living alone, seldom receiving visitors, and constantly on the brink of suicide as she wrestled in vain to establish a word view that afforded her some semblence of self-esteem.

By the time she was approaching her fortieth year, Melissa had already been subjected to countless psychiatric evaluations and treatment programs - most of which were drug based and centred around numbing the cacophony inside her head in attempts to control her increasingly irrational behavior. Melissa was eventually assigned a long term psychiatric counselor - Susan - who, far from rejecting Melissa's "other selves", appeared quite capable of understanding them and even gaining a measure of their trust.

It was not long thereafter that Susan retired, and she and Melissa became firm friends. And it is during this period that the Crazy People Incorporated musical is set - Melissa is still living alone, and still berates herself constantly for failing to live up to expectations, but even her frequent bouts of drinking and self harm do not appear to shake Susan's faith in the woman she has come to regard as her adopted daughter.

The characters in the Crazy people Incorporated musical are as follows;

Susan - a retired psychiatric counselor and social worker

Melissa - Susan's former client, now friend, who believes that she has 'other people' living inside her head;

And it is these other people - Melissa's 8 alter egos - who make up the remainder of the 10 strong all female cast.