A group of IU students created and published a Zoom film named “Nat 20 to Heal” that focuses on the theme of peer support in overcoming mental pain and trauma for young adults.
The students are mostly undergraduates from the IU School of Education with or pursuing a specialization in theater education. It was a project designed for a two-course sequence including Z-305 Theatre for Young Audiences in the fall and Z-402 Youth Theatre Tour in the spring.
Both courses were offered for the first time in the 2019-20 school year and were taught by Gustave Weltsek, assistant professor at the School of Education.
The film, created for a high school audience, tells the story of Ben, a struggling teenager, hosting a game of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom with his emotionally distant sister and two strangers as a last-ditch effort for human connection before he took his own life.
During the game, Ben suffers from a mental breakdown as the game deviates from his design. Consoled by his sister Tiffany, Ben begins to recover mentally when Tiffany rolls a “natural 20,” the largest number on the die, as a healer and defeats the dragon by healing it.
Sophomore Elaine Clarke, a member of the cast, said the idea of healing the dragon rather than killing it is to show there is no quick remedy to erase or cure one’s mental trauma, but recovery from trauma takes a long healing process. The film has a happy ending, but it's only the beginning of Ben's recovery process, she said.
Weltsek said the idea behind the film was to suggest a way to address mental trauma through facilitating gradual healing.
“A lot of the plays that are out there right now deal with suicide in a very depressing or sensationalized way,” he said. “It doesn’t dive into, ‘Well what do you do with it?’"
The idea of addressing suicide came from input from local high school students at the Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship, Clarke said. She said their interest in real-life struggles in mental health and identity convinced her and her classmates to write a story that addresses this deep topic.
In a fall course, the students came up with and fully developed the theme of their play. They began preparation for a live theater performance starting in the spring semester, but just as they almost finished writing the script, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“It was a huge blow,” said Connor Starks, an IU senior who played the protagonist Ben. “I think everybody felt some version of shock and – well, trauma, I guess, when the pandemic first hit.”
Starks said realizing the play would not be the live-theater performance they had envisioned was sad for the group. He said it was also stressful for the group to redesign the play into an online film format.
IU senior Andrew Galang, who played one of the D&D characters, said the group had to work around the limits of the COVID-19 pandemic and staying at home. Galang had to substitute the battle costume planned for the performance with clothes from his closet.
But after overcoming the shock, the students decided to redesign the script to acknowledge the mental stress from living through the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantining, Clarke said.
Weltsek said the process of the students coming to terms with COVID-19 was in itself a healing process for them.
Starks said although the film is created for high school students, they didn’t want the audience to feel talked down to. He said high schoolers have seen a lot about the complexities of the world, and the film was to represent the complexity in healing from emotional pain.
“Things do suck right now,” he said. “But there are still people out there that do care about you and do want you to keep going, keep fighting — and not somehow magically feel better, but it’s possible to heal that wound that you may have, slowly.”
Clarke said she and her classmate, Maiya Young, are creating a study guide for the film’s high school audience. She said they are also planning to set up a panel of theater educators to discuss the film. She said after some final cuts, the film will have a formal debut online and be presented to the public.
