300 Paintings, Created and performed by Sam Kissajukian; Produced by Sally Horchow and Matt Ross in association with Octopus Theatricals; Presented by American Repertory Theater at Farkas Hall in Cambridge, MA through October 25, 2025.
by Julie-Anne Whitney
Aussie comedian Sam Kissajukian didn’t know anything about art when he quit stand-up comedy four years ago. During his 10-year career, he toured throughout Australia, Europe, the UK, and the USA. Despite his success, he confessed, “I just did whatever the audiences wanted me to do, and I hated it. I hated myself.” For him, comedy had become performative and superficial – “It made me feel invisible inside.” After abandoning his comedy career, Kissajukian devoted himself to painting. What he didn’t know at the time was that he had been living with bipolar disorder, and he was about to enter into a brutal six-month manic episode that would completely sever him from reality.
In just half a year, having never painted before, he created 300 paintings (an average of 50 works per month). Some might view this spontaneous surge of creativity as the mark of genius, but for Kissajukian it was a hellish, frenzied odyssey through the hidden depths of his own mind. This arduous and illuminating six-month journey eventually led to the creation of his show, 300 Paintings, a thoughtful, comedic examination of the challenges of mental health and the healing found in making art.
In just 90 minutes, Kissajukian takes you on a wild six-month ride inside his mind. By combining verbal and visual mediums, he does more than just tell you what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder; he shows you what it feels like through his paintings. While he shares a few amusing images of some of his early artistic attempts (experimental self-portraits, faceless portraits of friends, abstract reimaginings of masterworks, etc.), the majority of his paintings show the frightening yet fascinating complexities of a disorder shared by 60 million people worldwide. His work explores feelings of disconnection and being trapped inside himself, of being pressed down under the weight of depression, of his overwhelming anxiety, and his inability to cope with it all. The paintings are varied in tone, technique, and quality (as Kissajukian freely admits). Some are somber and arresting, others are strange and mysterious, while others are diverting and playful.
Despite Kissajukian’s warm, affable stage presence, there’s a dark, melancholic undertone to all of his stories – a heavy sadness in the madness. While he regales us with hysterical, hard-to-believe stories about his outlandish artistic inventions and erratic business pitches to millionaire investors, it can be easy to forget that while he was doing that, he was also having hallucinations and panic attacks, and was rarely eating or sleeping.
One might say that 300 Paintings is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a serious medical condition goes undiagnosed and/or when you have a mental illness and you don’t seek treatment. Kissajukian reached the very edge of himself during this wildly creative yet dangerous manic episode. He did eventually seek out a psychiatrist, “someone who looked at what [his] mind could do and said, ‘that is of value’.” Therapy and medication were life-changing and, arguably, life-saving for him. Though bipolar disorder requires “constant maintenance,” Kissajukian realized that in finding a diagnosis, he also found himself.
By using humor as a tool for healing, Sam Kissajukian’s 300 Paintings shows that laughter is often a helpful antidote to trauma, grief, and mental illness. Through his candid and disarming storytelling, we are reminded of art’s inimitable power to help us connect to ourselves and to others. 300 Paintings creates a space for audiences to think about and, hopefully, talk about their own mental health, making the conversation more accessible, less frightening, and a hell of a lot funnier.
For more information and tickets, go to: https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events/300-paintings/
