Ellie Brelis hated the first one-person show she ever saw. She was in third grade, and she vividly recalls the second-hand embarrassment of watching the actress alone on stage, swapping characters by flipping the top of her dress down into an apron.
“I think one person shows are inherently, like, really cringey and egotistical,” she told the Gazette in a recent interview. “I promised myself I would never, ever, ever do one.”
Brelis, now in the middle of touring the world with her original one-person show called Driver’s Seat, acknowledges some might call her a hypocrite.
Brelis’ play, which explores her lifelong experience with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), made its Island debut at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse in September, directed by Island actor and writer Leif Moore. Before the Vineyard, Brelis brought the play to New York, Los Angeles and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Brelis’ Vineyard roots stretch back seven or eight generations — far enough that when someone stops her on the street to announce that they are a cousin, she tends to believe them. The summers of her youth were spent in Chilmark with her grandparents, John and Molly Flender.
Growing up with OCD was alienating for Brelis, especially attending high school in Cambridge, where peers were unrelenting in observing her differences. While Vineyard life was not free from difficulty, it had its oases, like the Green Room, the Vineyard Haven skate and surf shop where she worked as a teen.
“I was like, oh, these are my people,” Brelis remembered thinking. “This is where I feel at home and free, and finally in my body and not in my head.”
While studying theatre at Emerson College in Boston, Brelis acted in her first Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse production, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. At that point, Brelis had little patience for the Bard.
“[I] thought Shakespeare was pretentious and elitist,” she said. “It made me feel really, really stupid.”
But under the tutelage of Brooke Hardman-Ditchfield and Alexandra London-Thompson and, she grew to connect with Shakespeare in a new way.
She connected with the Vineyard’s arts community, too, and went on to act in Island productions of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and Twelfth Night. There, Brelis first encountered Leif Moore, her future Driver’s Seat collaborator.
“I ended up just kind of falling in love even more with the Island, and with the creative people on the Island,” Brelis said.
In 2020, Brelis entered inpatient treatment for her OCD. It was during this time that she began writing the earliest iteration of Driver’s Seat.
“I was like, I am the only person I have right now,” she said. “I don’t know how to process anything challenging in life without using the arts to do it.”
Driver’s Seat examines the contours of Brelis’ time in treatment, including her relationships with clinicians and other patients and the daily realities of her illness.
It also examines how OCD colors her life’s pivotal moments: realizing she’s queer, the death of her grandfather, a long-term boyfriend absconding suddenly from their shared life before resurfacing on an episode of Wheel of Fortune.
Brelis’ process of learning to drive a car, a fear she sought to conquer as part of her exposure therapy, acts as the play’s essential metaphor, anchoring her quest to gain control over her own life.
“I want[ed] to make my world bigger,” she said. “I want[ed] to live my life based on my values, not my fears.”
Driver’s Seat, accented with an inpatient dance break brought to its emotional and comedic acme by the Miley Cyrus song The Climb, exercises a comedic sensibility straddling the Gen Z and millennial worlds. Brelis, born in 1995, straddles these generational worlds herself. She said this can be an asset, helping her reach both young people used to meme-ing about mental illness and older generations that don’t share that same impulse.
“It helps me kind of find the sweet spot,” she said.
Where some previous directors hesitated to capitalize on what made Brelis’ story comedic, Moore, who has a background in improvisational comedy, did not.
“Leif’s the funniest person in the world, so they were like, no, we have to find the joy, we have to find the humor, we have to lean into it,” Brelis said. “We’re not belittling any of the experiences. We’re finding the humor in the horror of it all.”
Brelis admires stand-up comics Gary Gulman and Hannah Gadsby, both of whom are frank about mental illness in their work. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2024, Brelis was starstruck when her name appeared alongside Gadsby’s in a publication’s list of must-see acts.
And despite Brelis’ disdain for the soapy blockbuster film version of Girl, Interrupted, she adores its source material, the 1993 memoir penned by Susanna Kaysen. Ms. Kaysen writes about her time in inpatient treatment for borderline personality disorder at the same Belmont hospital where Brelis was treated for OCD.
Brelis once met Ms. Kaysen, who was delighted when Brelis described Girl, Interrupted as “one of the funniest books [she’d] ever read.”
“When it’s an authentic story being told from the person who lived it, that’s what really moves me and inspires me,” Brelis said.
Some of Brelis’ great inspirations are her real-life mentors: Ms. Hardman-Ditchfield, Island performer Shelagh Hackett and her own family, largely composed of creatives.
Brelis was proud to bring Driver’s Seat to the Island, which was so crucial to nourishing her talent.
“It’s taken on a life of its own and has gone to so many different places,” she said of the play. “To have it be able to come home was the greatest performing experience of my life.”