With love, all things are possible, even surviving emergency heart surgery. In Parker Mills’s The Abnormal Heart, stories are interwoven with humor to share a deeply personal autobiographical account of Mills’s life, leading up to the heart attack that threatened his life and brought him closer to the people around him.
After introducing himself with the tale of this pivotal heart attack, which occurred while Mills was doing a performance gig in a Donkey Kong costume, Mills takes us back to the story of his birth. Born severely underweight, he spent the first week of his life in newborn intensive care. This early experience, which he claims to remember, becomes a metaphor for the distance he feels between himself and others. Despite a childhood marked by isolation and not belonging, Mills makes the courageous choice to pursue the commercial arts as an actor, a testament to his resilience.
As Mills moves into adulthood, he is confronted with the difficulty he feels connecting with others, especially romantically and sexually. He experiences unemployment and takes odd jobs to make ends meet, which provides context to his feelings of loneliness and isolation. His Donkey Kong mask mimics the glass container in which he spent his early days, shielding him from danger, obscuring his identity, and feeling like people cannot see the person underneath. In a brief escapade of a mediocrely decorated sex club, he explores anonymity and the human interchangeability of hookup culture. He leaves feeling even more distanced from his fellow community.
Mill’s queerness is an inherent drive in this story. No matter how much the LGBT community grows over the years of Mills’s life, it fails to carve out a specific enough niche that Mills feels he can slot comfortably in. While as a child, Mills’s queerness was a trying experience because he was ostracized and made to feel wrong for behaving differently from other children, queerness challenges Mills as an adult because he feels that there is a queer ‘identity’ that he must live up to, a silhouette that Mills’s own shadow will never truly measure up to.
When Mill wakes up from his coma, days after the heart surgery, he realizes he was never truly alone to begin with. The presence of family, friends, food, and intense togetherness shows Mills that his glass walls are self-imposed and that the people around him have been trying to reach him his whole life. Mills’s gratitude for the people who have shown up for him and supported him is genuine, and he marvels that it took a life-threatening event to bring him to that realization.
The Abnormal Heart is deeply personal and thorough in its examination of Parker Mills’s self and his relationship to the others in his life.
“The Abnormal Heart”
Written and performed by Parker Mills
Directed by Marilyn McIntyre
October 4, 2024
The 17th United Solo Festival
September 24 – November 17, 2024
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd (btw 9th and 10th Avenue)
Rita Frances Welch is… Wait, who’s asking? There are a few answers depending on the context. Rita is A) A New York playwright, actor, and director, B) The owner of 5 discrete copies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, C) A force of nature, controlled by the tides and called to by the wind, disappearing and returning like the seasons. More material than their author, Rita’s plays have been produced by The Tank, Theatre X, Playwrights Performance, and Rogue Theatre Festival. They hold a B.F.A. in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory, during which they studied under LAByrinth Theater’s Martha Wollner and Padraic Lillis. Rita’s writing functions as an experiment- a combination of characters in the petri dish of their world, their personal challenges and delusions in a vacuum, isolating for every variable but one: Human nature, which reveals itself every time. ritafranceswelch.com
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