Review: ‘Lessons in Temperament,’ a Memoir of Mental Illness

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James Smith was in his first year of college when his older brother Josh asked him, on Facebook, if he had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mr. Smith ignored the question.

“I’d never heard those words before,” he recalls in his gentle solo show, “Lessons in Temperament.” But a few months later, he typed the phrase into a search engine. “And I saw this list of the deepest, most hidden parts of my mind, right there.”

The discovery was a comfort — because he understood, finally, that he had a lot of company in the world. That he also had company in his family was clear enough: Josh had asked the question because he had the disorder, too, and was at last getting help for it.

“Lessons in Temperament,” part of the Toronto company Soulpepper’s monthlong residency at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York, is a memoir of minds gone out of tune. Of the four Smith brothers, one has schizophrenia; another, as an infant, was deemed “mentally retarded with autistic tendencies.” For Josh, bipolar disorder is also in the mix.

As James, the youngest of them, tells the story of his family to an intimate audience in the Ford Studio, he tunes an upright piano, its innards exposed for us to see — the taut wires, the soft felt hammers. Even when a piano is tuned, he explains, it is impossible to keep it that way.

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