Content warning: ableism, institutionalization, medical abuse, mental illness, sanism, sexual violence

10 Days in a Madhouse is a psychological opera that plays with notions of madness, inspired by the life of Nellie Bly, a trailblazing reporter who in 1887 faked madness in order to be admitted to Blackwell’s Asylum for the Insane and report on conditions from the inside. Once inside the madhouse, Nellie encounters women whose poverty, racialization, and grief over past traumas has been mistaken for madness. Nellie herself immediately drops her “mad act” – troublingly, none of the medical staff notice or were are to identify her as sane. When Nellie is released from the asylum after 10 days, she pens a famed exposé detailing the appalling conditions in which the madwomen were kept. Nellie claims that the conditions are so poor and the mistreatment of the mentally ill so egregious that they could drive a sane person mad.

10 Days in a Madhouse exposes – as Nellie Bly herself did – the feminization of madness, the bias of doctors against the sanity of women, and how the systems and social structures in which women find themselves induce madness.

-Adapted from Opera Philadelphia