"During her first class at the comedy New York City club Upright Citizens Brigade, Melissa Bangs’ teacher gave her two tasks. One. Every time you get on stage, have the guts to make a fool of yourself. Take risks. Find out what’s on the other side of the more intimidating (more interesting) action." read more
"When Melissa Bangs talks about one of the scariest moments in her life, she makes it sound funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, at least not at first. But it sounds accessible and normal, even though it was frightening and surreal..." read more
"Melissa Bangs did an unusual thing after she'd recovered from postpartum depression and mania.
The Missoula visual artist, a self-described storyteller with a big mouth and no sense of shame, kept talking about it..." read more
"Four-week-old Adelaide Banginson slept soundly while her parents’ happy world shattered like the glass her mom threw against the kitchen floor..." read more
"The light was too bright. The walls too baby blue. There were three cameras on the ceiling, each from a different era. I tried to imagine what the 1950s model, still encased in its bulky wire cage, must have seen. Had it witnessed women strapped to beds with bits in their mouths to save their tongues?..." read more
"The first time I met Melissa Bangs she pitched me her story for Mamalode: a big, hard story about postpartum psychosis. I told her to tell it true, and she did. You can read it here.
Later I heard she was doing a one-woman stand-up show to share her story live. It was called “Playing Monopoly With God” – a show that was, at turns, sad and hilariously funny. How could a story of postpartum psychosis be funny? Intrigued and slightly nervous I agreed to attend..." read more
"Melissa Bangs is a storyteller, plain and simple, with a powerful story to tell. Her one-woman show, Playing Monopoly with God, is a masterpiece, wonderfully written and performed, although the subject matter is not what you would expect. Delivering her first child at the age of 40, Bangs encountered postpartum psychoses which resulted in a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder and a month-long stay in a local psych ward. Bangs rose above that misadventure and now tells her story in her stunning show, currently running at the Crystal Theatre on the Hip Strip in Missoula..." read more
"Some performances are harder to watch than others. You’d think a one-woman show about postpartum psychosis would be among that group, right up there with movies about Alzheimer’s patients, over-earnest after-school specials and cautionary tales about catastrophic historic events. You’d be well within reason to presume Melissa Bangs’ Playing Monopoly with God & Other True Stories, a first-person account of how a new mother ends up in a psych ward and ripped away from her perfect newborn daughter, fits snugly into the downtrodden category... " read more
Read full article. Before giving birth at 40, Melissa Bangs never even had a panic attack. Read more.