This article includes mention of suicide. If you are in crisis and need someone to talk to, text or call 988.
Jamie Goss spends her day-to-day as the Young Lawyer’s Division Coordinator for the State Bar of Georgia, but her true passion is theater.
The Atlanta native is an actor, director, and acting coach in the theater community, but she will make her playwrighting debut this month with her new play, “The Women of Willow Creek.”
The play follows Harper and five other women in the Willow Creek rehabilitation facility over the course of 28 days as they navigate the realities of recovery. The show is inspired by Goss’s own experiences in rehab from ages 15 to 21 following suicide attempts.
“It’s been about 20 years since some of this happened, and I finally felt ready to start processing it,” Goss told Rough Draft. “Culturally, it feels very significant, very relevant.”
“The Women of Willow Creek,” while fictional, is inspired by the girls and women Goss met while in rehab and shares a powerful story of survival and resilience. It sheds light on mental health challenges like suicidality, eating disorders, substance abuse, and PTSD.
In the U.S., suicide is the second leading cause of death for children and young adults ages 10 to 34, and every 52 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies as a direct result from an eating disorder. Goss noted that the show tackles serious issues impacting many people – around 28 million Americans will experience an eating disorder, and 12.8 million American adults seriously thought about suicide in the last year – but the show is ultimately a comedy that won’t leave the audience feeling worse after watching.
“You’re not going to be traumatized by watching it, but it definitely is a window into what real treatment, real recovery, real trauma, real life is in a way that I’m not sure I’ve seen other people do,” she said. “There’s a lot of humor in it, it’s a dark comedy because these girls, they’re using humor to deflect from what’s actually happening to them.”
Goss will host a free staged reading of “The Women of Willow Creek” at OnStage Atlanta on Jan. 22 at 7 p.m. The show will not be a full production; the actors will have the scripts in front of them while they act through the show, and Goss will encourage feedback from the audience to further perfect the script before “hopefully” fully producing it.
Goss hopes her show helps further normalize the discussion of mental health, both in coping with your own mental health struggles and better understanding and helping the people around you.
“I’ve come to understand that this [show] may have a bigger impact than I think,” she said. “There’s probably a lot of women – people, men and women – who need to hear some of the things in this story. I think it’s validating for a lot of people.”
Seating for the reading on Jan. 22 is first come, first served. The reading is free, but donations benefiting OnStage Atlanta are encouraged. To learn more, visit gossmjamie.wixsite.com/jamiegoss.
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