‘Comedy is Not the End Goal’: Sam Kissajukian Embraces the Interdisciplinary in ‘300 Paintings’

There’s no question about it: Sam Kissajukian is at home on a stage. Sitting for an interview with The Crimson on the stage of Farkas Hall, where he is starring in his autobiographical one-man play “300 Paintings” through Oct. 25, Kissajukian exudes the same charm and charisma that he brings to Cambridge audiences eight times a week. Kissajukian’s play is currently partnering with the American Repertory Theater while on tour, having already performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Vineyard Theatre in New York City.

“300 Paintings” tells a powerful story about Kissajukian’s struggle with bipolar disorder. During a manic episode in 2021, Kissajukian locked himself in an abandoned warehouse for six months and generated the titular 300 works of art, and in the play, he tells that story in a frank but hilarious manner. After all, before he donned a beret and committed himself to a career as a visual artist, Kissajukian spent many years as a stand-up comedian. To him, performing this piece is a much-needed departure from the artificial stand-up form, which he is eager to leave behind.

“In [300 Paintings], the comedy serves the goals of the show. Talking about mental illness can be confronting for people. Comedy is a great way to create accessibility — if you can keep people laughing, it stops their defense mechanisms from going up. There are jokes that I could put in that I’ve stripped out because they don’t push the show forward,” Kissajukian said.

Performing a one-person show is a Herculean task by any measure, and it is compounded by Kissajukian’s ongoing experience with mental illness. He lives a very “low-key life” in order to remain in a stable state for each performance — “The show doesn’t work if I’m manic,” he said. The medication he takes also causes struggles with memorization that ultimately led him to perform “300 Paintings” without any kind of formal script.

Rather than seeing this as an obstruction, however, Kissajukian invites audience reactions to shape the show, which can vary by about 12 minutes in length night to night. At the end of the piece, Kissajukian explicitly asks audience members to speak with him about their reactions, either in the theater lobby or via email. Whether people end up sending him their own artwork or letting him know which parts of the show they didn’t find clear, he believes that this post-show interaction is part and parcel of the emotional story he tells.

Some of Kissajukian’s most important audience members have been his own friends and family, many of whom weren’t fully aware of what he went through in 2021. The only person mentioned by name in “300 Paintings” is a fellow standup comedian, Kyle Legacy. However, Kissajukian is quick to point out that everyone who comes up in the piece has seen it and approved their inclusion.

Audiences coming to “300 Paintings” get the chance to view a full art gallery on top of a one-person show. At the end of the piece, the theater’s curtain rises to reveal an expansive exhibition of Kissajukian’s post-diagnosis work. Rather than art centered around a certain theme, Kissajukian has selected “exemplary” pieces that showcase the range of his varying emotional states for the audience to observe.

Farkas Hall, which at 250 seats is the largest venue the show has been performed in, allows this gallery to be presented onstage. It also enables the screen depicting images of Kissajukian’s work throughout the play to be placed fully behind him rather than next to him as it was at the Vineyard Theatre: an experience which, as he describes it, made the performance feel more like a two-person play.

Performing in Cambridge has brought a younger audience to “300 Paintings” than it found in its previous runs. While Kissajukian loves connecting with older audience members, who have “been through so many life cycles,” he appreciates a responsive younger crowd. He also finds that the theater’s proximity to Harvard provides a “wonderful kind of environment” for frank discussions of mental health.

“During my manic episode, I went through an inventing phase, and I was making all these inventions, and I came up with an invention that essentially tracks the movement of mold growing and then vibrated the pattern of the movement of the mold back at the mold to see what it did. I emailed Harvard that night to say that they should really look into this because I didn’t have the time. Then when the A.R.T. picked me up for doing the show here, they sent me a message and just said, ‘bring the mold.’ It was really funny. So it’s like this is so uncanny that this is here and I’m here now,” Kissajukian said.

Ever the boundary-pushing creative, Kissajukian is already making plans to continue exploring the story of “300 Paintings.” At the end of the month, he will play a week of performances at the 1,100-seat McCarter Theatre at Princeton University. He is currently working on a TV adaptation of the show, which he foresees taking up the next few years of his life. He is also inspired by Punchdrunk, the immersive theater company behind productions like “Sleep No More” and “Viola’s Room,” to try to create an interactive experience that “highlights the power of art” while maintaining a “strong comedic tone” and incorporating the story behind this prolific period.

When asked for advice for future painters, Kissajukian said: “How I make art is not relevant to how other people make it, and I would never want to dictate that. There is no ‘should.’ We don’t need to make art. It’s just an image on the wall.”

After seeing “300 Paintings,” audiences may find that with some hilarious context, art can be so much more.

“300 Paintings” runs at Farkas Hall through Oct. 25.