A new play illuminates the over 100,000 lives lost to overdoses

On Sept. 19, 2014, Adam DelMarcelle walked into his brother’s room and found him slumped over, dead, as he would later learn, from a fentanyl overdose.

The brother — who isn’t named — was a wonderful son, father, husband. He was a compassionate, caring social worker and a fitness buff with 30-inch biceps. Dying from an overdose was the smallest part of his life.

Adam and his brother Charlie DelMarcelle created Simpatico Theatre’s production of A Shadow That Broke the Light — part play, part art installation — to make sense of not only what happened to their brother but to the over 100,000 people who die from overdoses each year in the U.S.

“We are useful,” Adam said, “because as artists we have the ability to bring form to how people feel.”

A Shadow That Broke the Light plays through Jan. 28 at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake in Center City.

The experience starts in the lobby of the intimate black box theater where Adam, an art professor at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., has created My Home, 2021 Dollhouse, a model of his Lebanon, Pa., home — where he lives with his wife and child, and the place where his brother died. The house stands on a pedestal, its inside packed with new hypodermic needles, all to be donated to harm-reduction groups at the show’s end.

The art continues inside the theater as part of a simple stage set. Three parallel rows of clotheslines frame the performance space, with pale, individual dish towel-sized rectangles of paper hung side by side.

Gaps remain — how they become filled is part of the theater piece.

As the show opens, Charlie explains that Adam, working with physician and artist Eric Avery, created the paper squares using fibers from clothes donated by families of people who died from overdoses.

In 2019, when Charlie, a theater professor at West Chester University, started presenting the play as a solo piece, 197 people were dying daily by overdose, or about one every 7 minutes and 19 seconds.

He built the work on stories about his brother and from those he heard from grieving families living with guilt, regret, anger, and an aching loneliness..

Separated by a gong, each story, or perhaps a story and a song, was meant to last 7 minutes and 19 seconds.

Now, one person dies from an overdose every 5 minutes and 39 seconds — or 255 daily in the United States.

Charlie tells the audience that he had considered shortening the stories. Instead, he made a dramaturgical decision to let the gong stop the stories — sometimes in midsentence — at the 5-minute, 39-second mark.

Both brothers are strong advocates for all types of harm reduction, including safe-injection sites where people with substance abuse disorders can consume their drugs under medical supervision, with help at hand if they overdose. Such a site has met with legal and community opposition in Philadelphia.

» READ MORE: New York’s supervised injection sites have halted nearly 700 overdoses in just over a year

“Why do Americans hurt as much as we do?” Adam asked. “Why, in the supposed greatest country on earth, do we consume the most mind-altering drugs?

It’s a big question, he acknowledged. But, “in the meantime, we have to save lives.”

Through Jan. 28, “A Shadow That Broke the Light,” Simpatico Theatre, Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St. Phila.

Post-performance speakers: Filmmaker Joe Gietl, producer of “Mariah: Acts of Resistance,” about the opioid epidemic, on Jan. 21 and freelance journalist Christopher Moraff, who has been reporting on the overdose crisis from Kensington, on Jan. 27. Pay what you can. simpaticotheatre.org