Review: SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE... a Touching, Comedic Take on Mental Health

When someone we love suddenly finds themselves in great distress, and a therapist offers one quick, seemingly simple, chemical solution, should we take it?

And what if it turns out that solution is ten times worse than the distress your loved one was experiencing in the first place? What if the odds of crippling consequences, which seemed so remote at first, suddenly loom large and threaten to swallow you whole?

These gut-wrenching questions lie at the heart of Lisa Loomer’s latest offering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, her comedy “Side Effects May Include…”  A sometimes-harrowing tour of her son’s treatment for anxiety that ended up creating the titular side effects, with nightmares galore both for him and for his family.  

“Side Effects” is at heart a cautionary tale about what happens when we rely too much on the judgment of others, when professional knowledge pales in the face of simple human understanding.   Loomer takes us on a whirlwind tour of therapists, nurses, and others, all of them ably embodied by a company of talented shape-shifters who play a succession of nurses, therapists, friends and family.  That they all seem as clueless and powerless as she is makes for some wonderful comic moments, even as the tale unfolds.

Scenic and designer Chelsea M. Warren creates an open space that allows for the supporting cast's many brisk exits, costume changes and re-entrances, with bare 2X4 wall studs and hangar pegs, and simple furnishings that provide us with a variety of places and times.  And Kathleen Geldard provides just enough new clothing, baseball hats included, to symbolize an actor's change in character, mindful of the seconds involved in changing from one persona to the other.

As Loomer herself, Liza Fernandez bonds with the audience instantly and gives you a glimpse of the seemingly perfect, upper-class world of a talented screenwriter whose family is torn apart by the diagnosis of her son—and the cascade of consequences that results from prescription after prescription, brutal side effect after brutal side effect.  Beginning with a profound case of Akathisia (from the Greek, meaning roughly “can’t sit”), which leaves her son with a body completely out of his control, constantly restless, a condition that resembles Parkinson’s but which can be the direct result of a doctor’s prescription. 

The story has more than its share of light moments—we have Fernandez’s impersonation of Rachel Maddow, as she interviews a German therapist about the dirty secrets of Big Pharma, and Susan Lynskey is letter-perfect as the interviewee.  Sophie Zmorrod, meanwhile, offers an emotional anchor as the love of Loomer’s son’s life; her quiet understanding of his condition is a saving grace, to be sure.  And our heroine’s struggles are made easier by the ongoing interventions of her son’s Best Friend, a brash Millennial hacker played here Jimmy Kieffer (when not also playing Loomer’s deceptively quiet husband).

The play’s journey comes to a moving conclusion when Loomer’s son is permitted to speak for himself, through his now-broken body.  Micah Meyers recites a poem that proves the son has most definitely inherited his mother’s gift for language, and the hopefulness that shines through this final moment, for all that has happened, is truly memorable.

Running Time:  90 Minutes without intermission.

Production Photo:  Liza Fernandez.  Photo by Seth Freeman.

The 2025 Contemporary American Theater Festival will run from July 11 through August 3, on the campus of Shepherd University in nearby Shepherdstown, West Virginia.