AfterRobin Williamshanged himself last year,Brian Copeland, the gifted Bay Area comedian, theater artist and radio talk jock who laid bare his own depression and suicidal urges in his hit 2012 show “Waiting Period,” had a long talk with his publicist, Sandy Friedman, who’d also represented Rock Hudson.
Friedman thought the suicide of someone as famous and beloved as Williams would stir a public conversation about depression and mental illness, in the way that Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985 got people talking about that disease and changed the public’s awareness and understanding of it.
“I thought, ‘OK, let me see what I can do to instigate this conversation,’” says Copeland, who revived “The Waiting Period” last fall at the Marsh, where for 18 months, five or six times a week, he’d performed the show Chronicle Theater Critic Robert Hurwitt called “as astonishingly funny as it is brutally honest.” Copeland did it again through this past May, but only on Sundays, after he’d finished his KGO talk show.
[For more of this story, written by Jesse Hamlin, go to http://www.chron.com/entertain...-Waiting-6381828.php]
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