When playwright Brandon Shaun Fields’ “What You Don’t See” premiered in 2024, Black men in the audience made a point of coming up to him after to say how much they saw themselves in the characters navigating their mental health.

“We could not have gotten a better impact statement,” he said. “They would say, ‘Thank you. That was me on the stage.’ It really felt like acting out real life. In weird ways, all of the characters are connected.”

A year later, in the midst of our current churning societal crisis that seems to be targeting Black people, among others, the Baltimore native knew there were more struggling men who needed this outlet more than ever.

“Because of what we’re all going through right now, we are even more sensitive about mental health than we ever have been before. It’s like we’re losing the game daily,” said Fields, whose work returns to the stage at the Chesapeake Arts Center in Brooklyn Park on Saturday.

“What You Don’t See” follows the journey of eight Baltimore men, whose ages range from their 20s to their 50s, as they parse their emotions against the specter of society’s idea of masculinity.

“The stigma is built around being considered weak and vulnerable. It means you’re not strong enough to be the leader of the family, to be the breadwinner,” said Fields, who lives in Towson. “In a sense, we’re not men if we hurt or if we cry, if we’re less than perfect.”

The Hechinger Report, which covers inequity in education, noted in 2022 that Black men were less than half as likely to seek treatment for mental health as their white peers. As a Black woman raised by Black men and raising one myself, it’s a statistic I felt personally even before I knew the numbers.

I am always haunted by the idea that guys I love were unable to realize their entire humanity because of the expectations placed on them. And it killed some of them. I’m committed to protecting my kid from a culture that denies him that full spectrum of emotion. Fields’ work acknowledges societal expectations, and the reasons they exist, while maintaining his vulnerability.

The play’s origins were “more internal than anything,” Fields said. “I was living the lavish life in a sense, with a really good job, making really good money, really establishing myself. Someway, somehow, depression slipped in. What I found was that I had been inflicting a level of pressure on myself that no one else really was.”

The artistic result was the compilation of eight stories into one strong message about the reality of those struggles. Fields said the message is universal for Black men, but it’s specifically staged in Baltimore.

“You get a lot of that from the accents that some of the characters use, focal points that are true to the Baltimore experience,” Fields said. “We are a small city that is really connected in ways in moments we don’t realize.”

I asked Fields what signs there might be that someone is struggling. “Anything that changes the personality or person that we know ourselves to be is a red flag,” he said. “Beyond that, the harder part to accept, for those of us who are high-functioning, is being attentive to the way that people who know us see us. So far as how our feelings affect us, we don’t know what’s coming up. We’re letting people who love us know better.”

As a former so-called gifted child whose anxiety was, in part, fanned by the flames of expectations and not wanting to disappoint anyone, I deeply felt that. And that’s without the further chains of perceived masculinity.

Fields hopes that Saturday’s production furthers “the impact of this show, to be felt in a major way,” and then he can retire it and develop further projects. But he knows “What You Don’t See” has done so much good already.

“I have had people say that they’ve sought out therapeutic solutions after they saw the play,” he said. “I had another person coming in saying he didn’t talk to his oldest brother. But he brought him to the play and his brother broke down to him and apologized. And now they have a relationship.”

The important thing is to keep the conversation going. “If we don’t stop talking about this,” Fields said, “we won’t be able to access the future, because there won’t be a future to access.”

“If we don’t find ways to stand with and for each other in times we are vulnerable or tired, we don’t know what we’re living through.”