Playwright: Kate Hawley
At: Striding Lion InterArts Workshop, Athenaeum Theatre
Phone: (312) 902-1500; $15
Runs through: June 29
Declaring that ‘Male hysteria is impossible,’ young Dr. Freud takes on attractive female patients in his iconoclastic exploration of emotional causes for physical ailments. By the end of this 90-minute performance piece, Freud and his patients are stripped to their underwear as Freud recognizes his own chauvinistic sexual desires. Facing an anti-Semitic medical establishment hostile to his ideas, Freud declares himself hysterical.
This work unknowingly parallels the superb 1962 film, Freud, starring Montgomery Clift. But while the film biography is detailed and naturalistic, the Striding Lion InterArts Workshop take is intentionally broad, expressionistic and non-literal. Freud isn’t even named although that’s whom bearded, dark Matt Yde looks like as The Doctor.
In a sophisticated integration of elements, Striding Lion amplifies the text with dance and movement used to physicalize the subconscious, all of it played against a spare scenic design featuring a colorful collage of painted images—very Dali-esque—inspired by late 19th Century art. Each element has merit and appeal, but they don’t fully coalesce. The end product is not greater than the sum of its parts.
Perhaps the text by Kate Hawley (also the director) is too simple in technique (not its ideas), being mostly a two-person dialogue between the Doctor and his patient, Elisabeth (the strikingly lovely Annie Kehoe, sometimes hard to hear). Divided by dance interludes, few of the scenes are inherently dramatic or tense, which may be a function of acting and direction as much as writing. The choreography by Erin Harper has energy and some humor (the opening hysteria expressed as arms-akimbo, jerky turns), the only misstep being the too long and silly, orgiastic closing sequence. But the dance/movement sequences are foreshadowed by the dialogue—we are told what we will see—reducing them to spectacle alone. In other words, dance and movement are not intrinsic to the tale, merely added on to it.
The Viennese-inspired original music by Zach Brook, chiefly for string trio, is very fine; at one moment in the lilting manner of Johann Strauss and Brahms, at another moment in the edgy manner of Richard Strauss and Bruckner. The clean scenic design—a trace of Japanese influence?—and artwork are by Willie Robertson, with lighting by Michael Tallon Ciok that’s far more ambitious and professional than one usually finds in studio theater productions (kudos to the Athenaeum for equipping its four studio spaces so well). Alas, like the dance, the Robertson collage is an attractive add-on; a backdrop that doesn’t specifically serve action or drama.Bottom line: despite lots of good stuff, Hysteria doesn’t dig as deep as it wants to, and Striding Lion has not yet made all the pretty pieces flow FROM the story, not merely around it.