Finding a ‘Safe Landing’: Playwright shares his ‘path to healing’ in play on mental health

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.

Since graduating from Libertyville High School in 1979, Tim Kough has lived an adulthood marked by traumatic mental health changes. How he has coped with them — and how he hopes others in similar circumstances may benefit — is the subject of his new semi-autobiographical play, beginning a two-week run Friday, March 14, in Chicago.

Kough’s play “Safe Landing: How the Owls Saved Me” follows a songwriter grappling with writer’s block who is admitted to a mental health facility after attempting suicide.

“My hope is that someone will see this play and think, ‘You know what, instead of trying to kill myself, maybe I’ll go to the emergency room and then maybe get on a better path to healing,’ ” said Kough, 64, who also holds the lead role in the Greenhouse Theater Center production.

Kough said he was hospitalized for the first time in 2017. He suffers from major depression and anxiety, and has been admitted into the psychiatric ward of a hospital for up to 10 days at a time, with his most recent stay being in 2022.

He said before his first hospitalization, he was under a lot of stress from work and had become noncommunicative. He said he would cry in the bathroom nearly daily, but did not tell anyone what he was going through.

His wife, however, noticed he was struggling and recommended he go to a hospital.

“I was in a very, very dark place for several months, and then I had a suicide attempt, and I went and stayed at Lutheran General Hospital,” Kough said. “Within a couple of days, I was a new person. Just between the medications and the therapies.”

Before his first hospitalization, he had no idea about the help and support that was available to him, he said.

During his first hospital stays, he wrote songs and a couple of monologues for the play, but took a pause on the project until the COVID-19 pandemic, during which he wrote the full play in three to four weeks.

“By the second day in the hospital that time, all of a sudden, I was writing lyrics for songs for the first time in years,” Kough said. “The premise of the play is, ’Can the power of human connection help heal trauma?’ And it unlocked a lot of creativity for me.”

The play also centers on fellow patients at the hospital Timmy stays in: a paranoid schizophrenic, a police officer with post-traumatic stress disorder; and others struggling with varying degrees of anxiety and depression. They are people who lead very different lives but connect through their struggles.

Sara Kough, Tim’s daughter, plays the role of Casey, a patient who, despite recovering from heroin addiction, acts as an “uplifting” protagonist, the type of person that Sara said she resonates with. She added that the play is a project that means a lot to her father, and she believes it will touch the hearts of audiences.

“This play does a really good job at breaking down those stigmas of mental illness, and it really humanizes the people that are in the show so you don't just see them for their flaws or what’s going on with them,” she said.

Tim Kough, though now retired, had been a full-time actor since the late ’80s, starring in Waukegan community plays and a show at the Genesee Theatre. He is also a songwriter, like his character, and a guitarist.

After his last hospitalization, he said he spent weeks going out to meditate in the woods. During one outing, a great horned owl flew within inches of his face. And after perching on a branch, it slowly turned its head 180 degrees to look at him. A few seconds later, it was joined by a second owl of the same species, a species that mates for life, and for several weeks they visited him, at some point joined by a second pair.

The owls’ commitment to their partners filled him with “peaceful wonderment,” he recalled. Ever since his adventures in nature, Kough’s mental health has improved greatly, inspiring the play’s title.

“[The play] starts out in a very dark place, but ends up with tons of joy at the end,” Kough said. “It's amazing the transformation that some of these people go through on their journey to healing.”

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“Safe Landing: How the Owls Saved Me”

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, March 14 through April 6

Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago

Tickets: $21 at (773) 404-7336 or ci.ovationtix.com/