When Cas Castellano moved to Australia from Philadelphia, she found it hard to fit in with her new community. That changed when she found a writing group, wrote a story about a dark time in her life and read it aloud on stage.

“It’s a story that’s true but not necessarily one I’d brag about on the street,” she says.

Castellano, 30, found it was liberating reading that story – about binge-drinking, cutting herself and breaking into buildings with a boyfriend as she struggled with her father’s declining mental health – in front of 200 people at a live performance night.

“It dispelled a bunch of shame that I was carrying,” she says. “The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. It meant something to them but they weren’t judging me for it.”

Castellano, who lives on the NSW Central Coast, is not alone.

Actor Rob Carlton (Boy Swallows Universe, The White Lotus) and his novelist wife Adrienne Ferreira (Watercolours) have been unearthing revealing tales from their community since they started a writing group called Bravewords three-and-a-half years ago.

It has evolved into monthly live performance nights, a podcast and a series of writing courses, including the popular Telling True Stories.

Carlton says that honest personal stories like Castellano’s unlock empathy in the audience.

“She felt like her family was failing, that she had to hide the truth from the world, that she was running away,” he says. “All she was feeling was the negative elements of it. All the audience could see was a young woman trying to manage a really difficult situation.”

At a time when loneliness and isolation are all too common – away from busier entertainment areas in Sydney and Newcastle – Carlton says Bravewords Live sells out every month.

“It’s the community every time going, ‘that’s me up on stage’,” he says. “It’s been amazing watching [them] get to know each other and remember that most people are carrying a sadness they don’t want to reveal.”

Along the way, Bravewords has helped rejuvenate the struggling central business district in Gosford.

Ferreira says she has seen lives transformed by learning to tell a personal tale - their motto is “true stories well told” - then sharing it on stage. The format of reading it means there’s no pressure to memorise or perform.

Some participants have discovered a talent for writing and have found like-minded friends for future projects. Audience members have bonded by sharing their own versions of the night’s stories over a meal after the show.

While it sounds like therapy, Ferreira is reluctant to call it that “only because that’s not the intention from the get-go. But this is what art does, right? It’s therapeutic and it’s cathartic and it connects”.

Carlton discovered the format at Story Club, the long-running live comedy show founded by Zoe Norton Lodge and Ben Jenkins in inner Sydney that was briefly an ABC series in 2015. (With Jenkins moving on to create the Stan series The Killings at Parrish Station, Osher Gunsberg has taken over hosting with Norton Lodge)

Taking part, Carlton learnt that by adding drama, humanity and vulnerability to a story rather than going for quick laughs, “you get a bigger laugh at the end of it and you also get a deeper connection to the struggle of what it is to be alive”.

He saw the value of these stories when a mental health nurse hired him to speak to farmers going through a drought in the Narrabri Shire, north-west of Tamworth, in 2020. He combined some of his stories into a show directed by comic Darren Gilshenan.

“The year before they ran suicide awareness workshops and not one farmer turned up because they called them that,” Carlton says. “Then they had this great idea to call it What a Relief: It’s Rob Carlton. We went out with a financial planning person and a mental health nurse. We were just masquerading, but it was really a mental health initiative.”

It worked, as a way for the nurse to start conversations with farmers about their struggles.

Carlton combined four of his own stories from Bravewords Live into the hit one-man show Virgin in a Knife Fight that, after debuting in Gosford in January, has run at fringe and comedy festivals in Perth, Adelaide, Newcastle, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. It runs at Glen Street Theatre in northern Sydney next month.

As well as being funny and heartfelt, Carlton’s show has a serious intention as it interweaves stories from his life. “My goal is to encourage conversations across the generations,” he says.

Virgin In A Knife Fight is at Glen Street Theatre, Belrose, on August 21-22. The next Bravewords Live is at Funhaus Factory, Gosford, on August 30.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.