Dubbed as a redevelopment season, 2025’s Chrome Dome and Schizo reads more like an internally coherent sequel to its 2022 season, as the cast and creative team have further explored and extended their scope. Trading in a certain amount of positivity about its story for a more complicated and holistic portrayal of a schizophrenic patient in recovery, Chrome Dome and Schizo is a bitter pill to swallow. 

As the titular ‘Schizo’, Dan Goodwin takes on an uncharacteristically subtle persona. Those who have seen Goodwin’s performance poetry will not miss the scenes it constructs that have that glow of enchantment, so enamoured with humanity as beautiful and complex even in its most mundane activities. Crashing against this is the startlingly grounded, unheroic portrayal of a bad patient, someone who struggles to accept treatment and sees themselves as justified in doing so, by degrees shifting between witty and playful to rude and oblique, depending on your point of view. 

Aspects of Schizo’s experience are integrated in the stage environment. Light flashes and voice-over give us intrusive thoughts, artfully arranged by the creative team with leadership from Rae Longshaw-Park as director and producer. Positioned this way, atmospheric elements provide surreality as a split-focus from otherwise prevailing realism. As opposed to the delivered internal monologues, this presentation allows schizophrenic experiences to be externalised and given objective form.

Given that Dan wrote Chrome Dome and Schizo to tell their own story, the shift of perspective in this version is really remarkable in how it makes space for others. Less focus is given to Chris (Georgie Llewellyn), aka Chrome Dome, Schizo’s partner, a terminal cancer patient, and a hallucination. Fundamental to the new shape this story takes is the delivery of that final piece of crucial information. Where the 2022 run left the reveal of Chris as a hallucination until the end, the redeveloped version front-loads this information with an ER-aftermath of Chris’s death, setting the stage for a story of mourning. This makes it all the more important that Llewellyn portrays Chris with such an earnest charm. Their relationship is sold to us as real in its comforting warmth and in its sharp edges as the pair struggle to give and receive care from each other. 

The theme of care is developed and expanded on with Brit O’Rourke as Schizo’s sister, Laura. Laura is mourning too. Receiving Schizo from inpatient care, she has little idea what to expect and is on the precipice of her own mental breakdown that makes giving care seem like an impossible task. The distance between them is fraught, potentially dangerous. For any schizo in this position, what little help there is, what spaces allow them to be self-determined, might vanish at any moment based on the decisions of whoever they’re depending on. The tension, then, is what degree of stress would make it impossible for Laura to continue living her life as she has been. 

Sahil Arora plays the cavalcade of doctors that both structurally and dialogically challenge the piece. Medical care, here, takes an antagonistic position for how it formulates Schizo and Chris’s relationship into something that needs defending. Only the ER doctor from the opening scene seems particularly concerned with Schizo’s self-determination, treating them as a competent adult making questionable decisions about their care. As for the rest? Well they certainly aren’t mana-enhancing. I hope that audiences are able to connect the dots between mistreatment and the effected struggles of Schizo.

Overall, this is a play I want to see developed even further. At ninety minutes, its ideas and scenes are hard up against each other in a way that I imagine could be disorienting without the context I personally come to it with as an audience member. Already this is against the trend of tighter hour-long performances at Basement Theatre that the initial season fit the profile of. Two hours would be appropriate for a work with complexity of its current iteration, and, if we’re ever graced with a third season of that length, I hope it takes that time to rekindle more of the optimism of its 2022 run.

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