Crazy Mama

Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness is a solo play with live blues, written by Sharon Scott Williams about her own childhood. It takes place in Roanoke, Virginia, a Southern railroad town, where a girl named Sharon grows up in a household shaped by her mother's paranoid schizophrenia. The play looks at what a serious mental illness does to a family, and at the child who keeps looking for hope inside it.

This is a new play, not a revival. Rubicon Theatre Company of Ventura, California, produces it, and 59E59 Theaters hosts the production for a limited engagement as the first New York staging of a work that debuted at Rubicon in 2025. It is billed as an Off-Broadway premiere.

As of October 2026, Linda Purl plays Sharon, both as a child and as an adult, and every other person in the story. Will Huse shares the stage as The Blues Man, a musician. Purl and the director, Anson Williams, both appeared in the TV series Happy Days, and this production brings the two together again. Purl has also been on a 59E59 stage before, in Mr. Toole in March 2020, where she took the part of Thelma Toole.

The first act is set in 1957. Sharon's family seems ordinary until she is eight years old. That is the day she comes home from school and finds her mother in the middle of a violent psychotic break, and the family life she knew comes to an end.

From there the play follows the household over the years. Mama is hospitalized in psychiatric institutions again and again, and in her own mind she is an FBI operative. Daddy gets through the days with Kentucky bourbon. Spikey, Sharon's teenage brother, goes through a crisis of religious faith. Sharon is the one who watches all of it, and she never gives up hoping that her mother will come home.

The second act covers the years from 1959 to 2002, so the story follows Sharon from childhood well into her adult life. Live blues runs through the evening, and the themes the company names are love, despair, redemption, resilience and hope. The company hopes the play makes it easier to discuss mental illness openly and lessens the shame around it.

Crazy Mama is autobiographical. The playwright built it from her memoir, Crazy Mama: A Memoir of Love and Madness, credited to Sharon MaHarry. The memoir took the 2014 Southwest Writers Competition and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference Fiction Award.

Because one performer covers the whole cast, the script travels between voices rather than between actors. As of October 2026, Linda Purl's roles beyond the family include aunts, doctors, nurses and neighbors. Will Huse plays live through the evening, supplies the musical transitions between scenes and works something like a Greek chorus.

A blues song that shares the play's title links the scenes together, and its refrain calls for the title character to come home. The playwright wrote the lyrics, and Tommy Holcomb composed the music. The script is in English and runs in two acts.

The play is staged in Theater C, the smallest of the three spaces at 59E59 Theaters. It is a black box that seats at most 48 people in a one-sided arrangement or 53 in a two-sided one, so the performance happens in a very small room.

The design credits cover lighting, projection and sound, along with original music, and a live blues musician plays alongside the actress throughout. The New York run was supported in part by the Ron and Cheryl Howard Family Foundation.

Rubicon gave the play its world premiere in Ventura, where the run began on March 26, 2025, and continued through April 13, 2025. It was the first production of the script. As of October 2026, the New York company includes Linda Purl and Will Huse, both of whom came east from that premiere along with the playwright and the director. Huse, a Dallas-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who fronts the band The Late Great Charlie Borski, created his role at Rubicon.

Rubicon was founded in 1998 by Karyl Lynn Burns and James O'Neil and is based in a 180-seat theater in downtown Ventura. It last played 59E59 in 2015, with Lonesome Traveler.

In New York, the first two performances, on September 16 and 17, 2026, were sold as First Look performances, and an opening night was celebrated on September 22, 2026. Rep. Josh Gottheimer sponsored a congressional briefing on theater and mental health, and the playwright, the director and the two performers were announced for its panel before the run began. During the run, post-show talkbacks were held on several dates, and one of them featured Maggie G. Mortali, CEO of NAMI-NYC.