- Sarasota actor and storyteller, Scott Ehrenpreis presents "Clowns Like Me."

This hit one man show is breaking down the stereotypes of mental illness as Scott shares his own struggles with his mental health journey through humor.

(upbeat music) - I thought I would just be doing a script punch up.

Come in script, doctor.

Easy peasy.

But I met Joel and Scott and they had a huge, wonderful idea.

Scott wanted to tell his story.

He's a trained actor, he is a great actor, and he has lived with mental illness his whole life and kept it hidden as best he could and it was time for him.

He wanted to come out and help other people by telling his story through the medium he knows best, which is theater.

- And this is why Kung fu movies just really get to me because of the generosity you see between the fighters.

They have to put ego totally aside because you only look badass if the enemy you're fighting is badass too.

You need a worthy opponent to move with you.

There's no suspense, there's no payoff.

That's why the bad guys are the unsung heroes of martial arts films.

Those guys are just as talented that they're willing to lose, to get beat publicly to serve the story.

(upbeat music) - Scott was born in 1979 and pretty much from early on we knew something was a little, not quite right, but we had very little information to help guide us.

And I still feel guilty about this.

I raised him as the child that I wished we had had instead of the child that we had.

Because I thought, just put him in normal environments and he'll learn to be so-called normal and fit in, and didn't quite turn out as planned.

He was a bit hyperactive.

And then it got more painful as he got older and couldn't make friends, couldn't keep friends.

And so that was hard.

- Based on his diagnosis, which didn't happen until later in life, until he was 25, that he learned about Aspergers.

And being on the spectrum, that one of the things that I realized, that those that are on the spectrum are very gifted at one particular thing to a detriment of a lot of other things.

And one of Scott's gifts is acting.

- Find you another place.

I've seven years now, you're going to get sick.

- Love that Tom Jones is getting, - There was a playhouse called Brundage Park Playhouse right down the street.

And my parents signed me up for an acting camp and I didn't want to do it.

I was like, what is this acting?

This does not speak to me.

But then when I went and I experienced what it was like to be in a theater and having floorboards underneath my feet, it was like the kind of the moon and the stars were aligned kind of thing, you know?

So I immediately found my calling, my path.

(upbeat music) - When Joel and Scott told me what they wanted to do, it spoke to me on a deep level of truth telling.

There was going to be an authenticity here, 'cause Scott was not only the performer, he was the subject.

- He's an actor's director.

So Jason got to know me.

He made it such a healthy collaboration where I was kind of the author of my own story.

He wrote it.

But some of the dialogue from the play came right out of my mouth.

And that inspired him to extrapolate my truth.

And all the other campers start chanting, hit him, hit him, hit him, hit him.

And I look over and my brothers are screaming too.

Hit him, Scotty hit him.

Oh, finally something.

And he snaps and I just start punching.

Left, right, left, right, left, right, right into his gut.

His hands are up here, and my little 9-year-old arms are going like pistons, and I'm sweating.

And all the other campers are screaming with pre-teen blood lust and waving their canteen cards.

And my brother Noah, who has turned into a bookie, he's taking bets on how long I'll last.

- I gave a big piece of advice at the front end.

They had come to me with a very, very rough draft of about a five minute monologue.

And it was, to be frank, it was very angry, which makes sense.

He's been put upon his whole life.

He feels unseen.

And so they were, their first attempt to tell the story was just getting it off his chest.

And I was like, okay, yeah, there's truth in here, but no one wants to listen to this.

No one's gonna pay money to come listen to you, rant at them and tell them they're a bad person for being mean to you.

No one wants that.

So as I teach all my playwriting students and my actors, look, entertainment's not a dirty word.

It's the spoonful of sugar, if you want an audience to get close to you and to listen to the hard truth, you gotta make 'em like it.

You gotta make 'em have fun.

So we very intentionally took kind of a standup comedy approach to start.

And as the show kept developing, we held on to some of that standup comedy, but let it also become its own storytelling theater.

It goes into very deep, dark places too.

But we earn the right to do that because he's so dang funny and nice and charming at the top.

- Jason and I took a McCurdy's Comedy Bootcamp Class to learn the art of audience address, 'cause comedians, the great ones is conversational.

It was a struggle.

It was terrifying.

People loved that there was a wonderful degree of humor in it.

And I felt really good that I could laugh about this stuff, which was not funny eons ago, but I could laugh at it now.

It made it more comfortable and gave me more confidence that, hey, I can execute this.

I can do this.

(upbeat music) - The audience reaction was everything we were hoping it would be, both in terms of them being entertained, but also them being impacted.

Part of the project is that every performance includes a talk back.

- We want people to stay, spend another 20 minutes with us.

And I have to tell you, that's when the impact is its greatest.

- We had to take a leap of faith that if we told our story and told it true, that people would hear their story, reflected to them and they would embrace us.

And that's, I get kind of emotional.

And that's exactly what happened.

- It feels liberating that I can give experience, strength, and hope through my lived experience to others, and make them not feel alone as I've felt for so long.

(upbeat music) - To learn more, visit Lifelineproductionsinc.com.