The patients are crazy. The staff is crazier. The copy is insane.

LOGLINE

When Benjamin “Bunny” Kauffman, 52, lands on the seventh floor of a Manhattan psychiatric hospital expecting treatment, rest and a little privacy, he instead finds himself trapped inside a bizarre miniature society of eccentric patients, exhausted staff, institutional rules and completely irrational bureaucracy—where surviving the weekend means learning that the people labeled crazy may understand the world considerably better than the people running it.

THE STORY

Benjamin “Bunny” Kauffman wants to keep his head down. Unfortunately, he has checked into 7G, where keeping your head down only makes everybody wonder what you're hiding. His new neighbors include Leon “King L”, who approaches the ward like sovereign territory; Dr. Felix Aandahl, a patient whose title immediately creates confusion about whether anyone should listen to him; Teddy Stoltzfus, Gloria Fisher, Ernie Campbell, Saul Muanakense, Marcy Myers, Malcolm Reed and Brooke Boyer—nine people with their own rituals, grudges, alliances, obsessions and completely different interpretations of what constitutes normal behavior. Trying to maintain order are Lou, Imani, Darnell and Keith, staff members who know that hospital policy and actual human behavior stopped speaking to each other years ago. Bunny enters believing there are two categories of people on 7G—patients and staff. By Sunday morning, he's no longer sure which group requires more supervision.

What follows is a pressure cooker of medication lines, missing possessions, contraband economies, disastrous group sessions, territorial television negotiations, food complaints, hallway diplomacy, institutional misunderstandings and alliances that can collapse over something as small as a pudding cup. But beneath the absurdity, Bunny begins learning everybody's particular language. King L isn't simply performing royalty; he's built a system that gives him dignity. Gloria notices everything. Teddy has rules. Saul knows when to disappear. Marcy can turn minor information into a ward-wide event before staff knows anything happened. And the employees Bunny initially regards as jailers are improvising their way through an impossible job while trying to preserve some humanity inside a system built around procedure. By the end of the weekend, Bunny hasn't solved 7G—and 7G certainly hasn't solved Bunny. But when the doors finally open, the man desperate to get away realizes he's leaving behind the first group of people in a long time who never required him to pretend he had everything under control.

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