4.48 Psychosis
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Son of Semele Ensemble
Extended through November 16
RECOMMENDED
“At 4:48 / when desperation visits / I shall hang myself / to the sound of my lover’s breathing / I do not want to die / I have become so depressed by the fact of my own mortality that I have decided to commit suicide.” – Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
Watching Matt McCray’s deeply-felt, oddly lyrical production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, I thought of that frequently-quoted wisecrack by Groucho Marx that “I don’t want to be a member of any club that will have me.” In this case, the club in question is those who have battled serious depression. And within that club is the subset of those who have considered suicide as a way of ending that pain.
Not that you need to have been visited by the “noonday demon” of depression to appreciate this production, with its haunting lamentations and rituals of suffering — but it doesn’t hurt. Certainly the subject matter of Kane’s play couldn’t be clearer in her dance of death, a dance that ended with her own suicide by hanging at age 28, after first trying to kill herself by taking pills.
Sarah Kane majored in Drama at Bristol University and wrote four other plays that have been frequently produced all over Europe, but 4.48 Psychosis is not really a play at all. Rather it’s a rambling text without characters or stage directions. Kane’s friend David Grieg has called it a mapping of “the psychotic mind,” and it indeed reads like a woman’s chronicling of her own mental illness even as it is taking her down. While it’s a challenge for any director to stage this text — it has no beginning, middle or end, and no arc of development — it’s also a huge opportunity to create a world in which these words belong.
Scenic designer David Offner places us in a setting that suggests a mental health facility, with tiled floors, an institutional blandness, and a psychiatric doctor (Ron Bottitta) in a mousy brown suit whose droning voice is both an occasional comfort and a source of torment to our patient, played with terrifying rawness by Dylan Jones. But in the course of the 65-minute event, the setting also comes to resemble a prison, a torture chamber, a sacred chapel and a crypt. The playing space is bordered by water streaming through pipes, and the burbling sound of running water adds a note of peacefulness and meditation that often feels like an ironic commentary on the main character, who can find no peace of mind. In the middle of the space is an aquarium with about a foot of water in it. While narrow, it is large enough for a small person to fit inside — something that Jones eventually does.
The presence of so much water made me think of Ophelia from Hamlet, who of course drowned herself as a result of her own mental and emotional decline. But I found a lot of Hamlet himself here too — in the main character’s obsessive introspection, in her intelligence that brings her no joy, in her excoriation of society’s hypocrisies, and in the self-flagellating tone of her self-criticisms, as she feels trapped in a place of inaction, unable to live, unable to love, unable to die. Yet her torment is so vivid, so stark, that in the end it resists any literary comparisons or references. The woman trapped here may have read extensively, but what we feel is her pain, her human pain, and the absence of anything that can make it tolerable.
In addition to the patient and doctor, McCray has also peopled the stage with four other women (Melina Bielefelt, Taylor Hawthorne, Jinny Ryan and Betsy Zajko) who act as a Greek chorus, mirroring the main character’s suffering while also providing her with occasional comfort. This is the one aspect of McCray’s production that I have a problem with. While all the women are powerful actors, and their presence yields many interesting variations on the central dilemma, I don’t understand why they’re here. So much about them seems arbitrary. Why four? Why not two or three or six? They are all dressed in black, though in slightly different outfits — one wears a black skirt, another wears a lower-cut leotard — but I didn’t see anything that really differentiates one from the others. More than that, they undercut the terrible sense of isolation that eats away at the main character’s will to live. Instead they appear to provide a certain amount of support, even solace, though this doesn’t lessen Jones’s sense of aloneness. I kept waiting for McCray to have these women abandon Jones, so that we would experience her absolute solitariness. But this never happened.
Matt Richter’s lighting design is first-rate, sensitive to every shift in the main character’s mood, while Corwin Evans’s video collage is mesmerizingly lush, filling the screens as the words tumble out, yet never masking the scary blankness at the heart of it all.
In the end, though, it is Dylan Jones who makes this such a memorable event. She so fully embodies Sarah Kane’s agony (and occasional ecstasy) that we cannot take our eyes off her, cannot get her cries out of our mind long after the stage lights have dimmed. With her pale white skin and tangles of blazing red hair, she is like a priestess of pain, a Cassandra for our troubled times. And just as Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was ultimately her curse when her prophecies were never believed, so too is Jones’s main character cursed with a brilliance that gives her such a clear-eyed view of her own personal hell. But the hour that we spend in her company also feels like theatrical heaven, as she strips away layer after layer of her social self until we get down to what Shakespeare called “the thing itself” — her naked spirit.
Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Blvd, Rampart Village; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; Tues., 7 p.m.; extended through Nov. 16. www.sonofsemele.org. Running time: 65 minutes with no intermission.
