Ben Moroski’s Autobiographical Play “This Vicious Minute” Wins Awards at Hollywood Fringe Festival

Recently, Ben Moroski, a former participant at the Optimum Performance Institute’s specialized program for Borderline Personality Disorder and associated traits, including BPD with co-occurring conditions such as self-harm, continued to head down a healthy path of recovery and new-found peace in sharing his journey with others in a play he wrote while attending OPI.

Ben Moroski’s play, a heart-wrenching autobiographical one-man play titled, “This Vicious Minute,” recently appeared at the Hollywood Fringe Festival for audiences to see.

It won so many awards at the festival last month that he was asked to perform it again this coming August as part of the “Best of Fringe” extension series.

“This Vicious Minute” was nominated for the “Best One Person Show” Award and won both the “Best of Fringe” and the “I Am Fringe” Awards.

Members of the local media who attended one of Ben’s performances have given it great reviews:

“A powerful autobiographical journey…a no restraints, straight-shooting confession…[a] wildly fascinating tale…utterly raw, compelling and, most of all, intense…a heavy-hitting story that NEEDS to be experienced.” (LA Theatre Review)

Moroski is a graduate of the OPI Intensive for Young Adults with Borderline Traits, Borderline Personality Disorder and co-occurring conditions. OPI Intensive is part of the Optimum Performance Institute (OPI) in Woodland Hills, CA, a therapeutic, residential and educational program for young adults.

Moroski is quick to credit OPI for his continuing recovery.

“I could not have created this show or produced it without the help and support of the OPI community and I would not be where I am today in general without OPI,” he said.

Ben completed his long-term goal of writing a one-man play with the support of the OPI “Action Workshops” within the OPI Intensive Immersion and Mobilization/Integration program phases.

“This Vicious Minute,” Moroski explains, “is my attempt to lay it bare for the world to see. It is an achingly personal journey through a life plagued by an addiction that is too often shrouded in mystery, misunderstanding and shame.”

OPI Intensive is believed to be the first therapeutic/residential program in the United States to treat young men and women with BPD. Most programs do not even accept young men, which is tragic considering that Psychology Today has reported that Borderline Personality Disorder in men is often overlooked or misdiagnosed for a variety of reasons, even though BPD is believed by many professionals to afflict men and women just as equally.

Currently, Ben is preparing for his upcoming performances, writing another play and is an intern at PeterGreenberg.com, an internet travel site hosted by Peter Greenberg, the new CBS Travel Editor reporting regularly on “The Early Show” and its replacement, “CBS This Morning” and “CBS Evening News.” Greenberg may be best known as the Travel Editor from 1995-2009 for NBC’s Today, CNBC and MSNBC.

Moroski describes his performance as, “a journey about finding the strength to live the only minute we have – this present, this precious, this vicious minute.”

Visit the play’s page on the Hollywood Fringe Festival’s website for more information on upcoming performances.