This Denver Therapist Has the Musical Cure: Soapbox Therapy

Britt Mahrer, Denver native and graduate of Berklee College of Music, is a practicing therapist who moonlights as the star of Soapbox Therapy, a musical comedy show that jovially tackles the kind of issues that impact Mahrer's clients as well as society at large. On August 25, she’ll be at the Clocktower Cabaret with her piano to deliver laughs and insight through the unique lens of an artist who works with things like narcissism, anxiety and societal pressures every day.

“Why don't we laugh about some of this shit and disarm it a little bit?” Mahrer says when discussing the motivation behind the show. “There's a real importance to me that I'm not standing on the mountaintop — that I'm not going, ‘I'm a therapist, so let me tell you all the things wrong with you.’ It's about us being in the valley together and me being like, ‘Hey, we got our human shit — me too, by the way, my shit will come out in the show, too — and we can all come together and be like, ‘Hey, we're imperfect, let's dismantle this shit.’”

Mahrer’s love of musical comedy goes back to her childhood, but Soapbox Therapy didn’t come about until a few years ago. ”I grew up with a dad who was always listening to Tom Lehrer,” she says. “I have choreographed so many dances in front of the mirror dancing to Tom Lehrer songs as a child.”

While studying music in college, Mahrer struggled to find her identity as a musician. “I felt like I had no connection to the world, I had no understanding of how people helped one another," she says. "I felt very confused about why I'd spent all of this time for myself developing a craft.” This led Mahrer to start a company called Rockstars for Life, through which she helped children near the end of life put their last words into songs and recorded them for the children’s families.

“It changed my brain," she says. "It made me really interested in why the happiest people I've ever seen are dying children and the saddest I've ever seen are white musicians.”

This led Mahrer to go back to school and earn her degree in psychology. After returning to Denver and becoming a therapist, she began to find a new way to help people through music while also getting a better handle on her own identity.

The song that started Soapbox Therapy came out after a week of seeing patients who’d been damaged by relationships with narcissists. “True narcissists, not the buzzword 'narcissists' we like to use anytime someone hurts us,” Mahrer notes. That experience inspired her to sit down at the piano, and what followed was this phrase: “Oh, how lovely it would be to be a narcissist.”

The floodgates open, an array of songs poured out, from “Anthem for the Hourly Employee” to “The Rhinoplasty Tango.” Now roughly three years into the project, Mahrer has a bulletin board in her home where she visualizes the topics and songs that will be featured in each show, making for an ever-evolving performance that mixes ideas and experiences that have inspired her recently with old favorites that still ring true.

Mahrer’s performances are tailored to her audiences, and her work as a therapist provides the perfect field research. “Denverites live very stimulated, so we live with a lot of anxiety and the anxiety will manifest as being high performers,” she says. “We're a very ‘up’ culture....I think when people leave my performances, they leave understanding that they can actually take that exhale.”

Soapbox Therapy has a unique ability to make audiences laugh while confronting its burdens and insecurities. “I want people to know that what is happening inside of them is a perfect, beautiful, reasonable reaction to a crazy world," Mahrer concludes. "And so if I do it right, when people leave, they leave remembering that who they are is perfectly okay.”

Soapbox Therapy with Britt Mahrer, 7 p.m. Monday, August 25, Clocktower Cabaret; get tickets here.