Afterthoughts: A Post Story

Thomas Piper encounters a giant avian postman in Afterlife.  (Don't ask.)

It's rare, my friends, that I find myself on the horns of an ethical dilemma, but I've got one poking me in the ass big time right now. You see, I unthinkingly left my gym bag under my seat at the premiere of Afterlife: A Ghost Story at the New Rep last week, and the very nice people who work there retrieved it, and even kept it for me, for several days (as my partner was in New York with our car).  When I finally collected it, everything was right where it should have been - even my checkbook!

So I owe the New Rep big time.

And now, ummm . . . it's time to review Afterlife . . .  and ummmm . . . oh, dear. I really don't know what to say. But I do want to say something nice.  (I never have this kind of problem with the carnies who run the A.R.T.  I'm happy to tell the truth about them!)

But okay, here's what I can say about Afterlife that is absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent true: the New Rep is really much better than this.

Because sorry, I can't recommend Steve Yockey's play; it's basically the first half of Rabbit Hole slammed into the second half of Euridyce, and it feels very padded and kind of pointless, and it's really only ready (at best) for a staged reading. But instead, for reasons unknown, it's getting a rolling premiere across the country; this is perhaps what is most mysterious about this supernatural mystery (or whatever the hell it is). To be absolutely fair, Yockey does, finally, get to some intriguing material about three-quarters of the way through his script - but then he seems to think his work is done, and he rings down the curtain even as the stunned audience all but whispers aloud "It's - over? But it was just getting going!"

Okay - I've clearly no love for Steve Yockey; but it's also absolutely true the New Rep has mounted a very strong production of this very weak material. There is fine work from the entire cast, but particularly from Marianna Bassham, Georgia Lyman, and Dale Place (above, with Thomas Piper). The design is at a strikingly high standard, and the evening even features the literal destruction of a full-scale house by a tidal wave (I'm not kidding). Mr. Yockey's tsunami may leave an immense amount of talent high and dry, but you have to recognize that talent just the same.

And I'll also note, I think, that this playwright is associated with Dad's Garage - the former Atlanta haunt of New Rep artistic director Kate Warner. It seems to me this is not the first time a rather curious play in the New Rep's season has had some connection with that theatre. And so I've begun to wonder whether it's time for the New Rep to wave dear old Dad good-bye, pull out of his Garage for good, and take to the open road. For there are better, more challenging plays out there than are dreamt of in that theatrical body shop - indeed, we'll see a few of them, like Passing Strange, later this year - and the New Rep clearly has the brains and talent to do them justice.

And thanks again guys, for saving my gym bag.

Lynn Nottage's civil war of the sexes

The damaged women of Ruined.

I've been dragging my feet over reviewing Ruined (now at the Huntington Theatre) because . . . well, because the horror of the situation it accurately presents made me feel a little guilty about not liking it more. Plus even I'm getting a little tired of my pointing out the artistic flaws in shows that everybody else has decided are awesome.  And what's the use of analyzing Ruined at this point, anyhow?  It's already won just about every prize there is to win (although how it nabbed a Pulitzer, which is supposedly reserved for plays 'about American life,' I've no idea). [Correction! It turns out the Pulitzer rules state it is meant for plays "preferably about American life."]  And I have to admit that the play is big, and complicated - and undeniably powerful, at least in a sensational way.  To most critics, that makes it a slam-dunk.

I'll even admit that Ruined marks a big step up in terms of craft for its playwright, Lynn Nottage - at least when compared to Intimate Apparel (the only other script of hers I can recall playing in Boston) which was blunt and simplistic by comparison.  In Ruined, Nottage juggles far more characters (if not all that deftly), but more importantly, introduces far more complexity into her victimhood politics. There's some credible back and forth about situational ethics, and her central character, Mama Nadi, a madam who services both sides of the ongoing strife in the Congo, is treated with some irony - or at least, not unmixed sympathy.  She's nothing compared to Brecht's Mother Courage (her supposed model), but by millennial playwriting standards, she's of some interest.  This is more than enough to convince most theatrical observers that Nottage has graduated from P.C. agitprop to genuine art.

But alas, a little voice somewhere in my head tells me that Ruined is still P.C. agitprop; Nottage's simulation of actual art is often so artful, however, that the difference may be meaningless - and probably only a handful of people in Boston would appreciate such a distinction anyhow (there certainly aren't enough of us to fill a house the size of the Huntington; hence, the theatre's dilemma).  What troubles me most about the play, though - even as agitprop - is that Nottage doesn't really bring to life the specific hell that is the Congo, because she seems unable to draw convincing male characters (she's kind of like the black, female David Mamet; the opposite sex is a threatening mystery to her).  Thus the opposing forces sweeping through Mama Nadi's bordello are largely undifferentiated (although we see lots of sparring and jockeying for power between them).  And when and if the playwright allows a male character to break from the pack (as she does once or twice), and actively resist the horrible things that Men do, she seems unable to give him any convincing lines to explain himself.

Now certainly Men do horrible things.  But what has been going on in the Congo is SO horrible - even by masculine standards - that it cries out for some kind of explanation, or at least investigation.  When a playwright conjures scenes (which I trust are accurate) of men chaining women to trees and gang-raping them, or "ruining" their genitals with sabers, I expect some sort of treatment of this behavior beyond the victim wailing "WHY ARE MEN THIS WAY?" (which is all that Nottage seems to have to say on the subject).

For is the kind of blood bath the Congo has endured really an expression of the essential truth about men?  Put another way - is rape in time of war a revelation of man's true nature, or a revelation of an aberration from it? Before you decide, imagine  for a moment a play about Nazi Germany that ended with the cry, "WHY ARE ALL EUROPEANS THIS WAY?" and you'll begin to appreciate the problem I have with Ruined; we don't think of the history of the concentration camps (or, say, the genocide in Rwanda), as telling us the basic truth about mankind - so why should we feel differently about the Congo?   In a word, the horrors there are embedded in some kind of context that Nottage never makes clear - the men there may not "be" this way, but got this way, somehow; yet neither her women nor her men ever explicitly ponder their political or moral circumstances (again, this ain't Brecht).

But to be honest, I'm not sure Nottage is really all that interested in the Congo per se, or the ethics of war, either - and at any rate, she seems pretty disinterested in the atrocities that have been endured by the men of the region. Indeed, we get the distinct impression that for Nottage, the suffering of women counts more than that of men - and that the savagery reigning in the Congo simply offered her a chance to pound home her thesis that rape is the masculine norm with a more intense palette than usual.

And Nottage certainly knows from intense.  She's the kind of playwright who tops herself in a scene in which a scimitar is about to be thrust into a struggling woman's vagina by having another woman, pouring blood, stumble onto the scene after a botched self-abortion.  (You're glad she stopped there, just short of Bret Easton Ellis, in the vaginal-torture sweepstakes.)  But oddly, Nottage also seems to want to show the audience a good time (Hey, we want to sell some tickets here!, you can almost hear her thinking) - so the mayhem is often interrupted by dances and songs, and she wraps the show with an improbable shot of uplift.  I have to admit, however, the audience seemed to like this curious format; they seemed to appreciate the fact that although the point of the show was that sexual violence was the norm for men, at least that wasn't like a total downer.

If you haven't guessed by now that I found the whole extravaganza rather strange - well, I found the whole extravaganza rather strange.  BUT, if even one person who sees it becomes sensitized to the ongoing trauma in Africa, then Lynn Nottage has done some good.  And you can't argue with the quality of the Huntington's production (mounted in cooperation with the La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Rep). Liesl Tommy's direction was taught yet detailed, and Tonye Patano delivered an award-worthy performance as the hearty, hard-bargaining, Mama Nadi.  She was matched, however, by the trio of women playing her demoralized (or mutilated) charges: the sweet-voiced Carla Duren, the heartbroken Pascale Armand, and particularly the live-wire Zainab Jah (who I believe has the makings of Cleopatra in her) were all just about note-perfect.  The men, as noted, had far less to work with, but at least Oberon K.A. Adjepong (at right, with Patano), skillfully managed, as one of the rare sympathetic Y-chromosome bearers on stage, to make his part more believable than perhaps the playwright deserved.

Don't tread on them

Life under the heel of Bruce Rattner and Frank Gehry in In the Footprint.

I really don't know how ArtsEmerson does it, but in their inaugural season (the second half of which kicked off Wednesday with In the Footprint: The Battle over Atlantic Yards, above) they continue to bat close to a thousand - their season has been more consistent in its high quality than that of any Boston theatre I can think of for the last thirty years. To be brutally honest, so far nothing on the Paramount stages has knocked the dramatic ball all the way out of the park (although some productions have come close) - but at the same time everything I've seen there has been worthwhile. And frankly, that's unprecedented in my experience.  When I ponder what Robert Orchard has wrought this year, I can only think back to the decades he spent working under Robert Brustein at the A.R.T. - can you imagine what that theatre might have been like if Orchard had been in charge?  Boston theatrical history would have been completely different (and oh, so much better).

Ah, well - that way madness lies, ya know?  So let's get back to In the Footprint, a kicky little show with music (no, I don't think it's quite "a musical") by New York's The Civilians about the attempts of various players to ram a new sports arena, with attendant malls and skyscrapers stuffed with high-end condos, down the collective throat of downtown Brooklyn.

You may shrug at the topic - what do the travails of Brooklyn have to do with Boston?  But rest assured, the Civilians limn through this particular prism a devastating vision of millennial politics and, you know, how things get done.  For what soon came clear about the Atlantic Yards project was that - as one disgruntled homeowner points out - no elected body or official had ever voted on it ever.  And yet it was presented to the public as essentially a done deal, with a posse of media stars (Frank Gehry, Jay-Z) lining up in support of Rattner's bulldozing much of Prospect Heights.  Indeed, as residents began to fight back against a veritable octopus of appointed agencies and authorities (each, of course, with its own acronym), they slowly realized that essentially, the city's bureaucracy had ceded Bruce Rattner the power to buy up much of their neighborhood on no authority other than his own.  (And what's more, a lawsuit pointing out this sad state of affairs even lost out in court after a battle that lasted years.)

This portrait of civic sleaze is depressing enough, but where In the Footprint breaks from the pack is in its merciless dissection of the liberal political cover Rattner deployed to get his way.  Dangling the usual goodie-basket of minimum-wage jobs and some token low-income housing, the Rattnerettes deftly deployed a strategy of divide-and-conquer that left local activists sputtering.  With Jay-Z, basketball, and new jobs on his side, it was easy for Rattner to depict residents unhappy with the scheme as merely racist gentrifiers - which he promptly did.  The resulting fireworks are sometimes ugly, but always pointedly funny - in fact, I can't think of a more accurate portrayal of the Way We Live Now that I've seen on any local stage in several years.  And somehow the Civilians manage to keep sympathy with the community's many opposing viewpoints even as they lightly satirize them - except, of course, when it comes to the repulsive Rattner (who's portrayed by a Tonka truck) or the vapid Gehry (played by his latest titanium doodle).

The six-member cast proves versatile and appealing, and Steve Cosson's script (as you might guess from the visual gambits above) skips lightly between satirical revue and editorial cartoon.  Alas, the one gap in the show is its music, which plays like watered-down William Finn (with the requisite over-articulate lyrics); but even the score rights itself at the last minute, in a moving paean to the type of neighborhood that can never survive the steamroller of a sports arena.  But at least, thanks to groups like The Civilians, the deaths of such places will be remembered.

Death of the salesman

Craig Houk grills Michael Pevzner in Glengarry Glen Ross.

The Independent Drama Society first popped up on our theatrical radar screen with an able production of Proof last summer; now the intrepid troupe has decided to tackle a more ambitious text, David Mamet's biggest Broadway success, Glengarry Glen Ross, at the BCA's Black Box through this weekend.

And the good news is that, like Proof, the production is surprisingly strong - although Mamet's famous savaging of a corrupt real estate office is here never quite as savage as I think its author intended. Director Brett Marks has inculcated in his cast the rhythms of Mametspeak, and the spoken performances flow along admirably. This, of course, is all a production can aspire to, according to this particular author's own claims. But other observers might note the character work behind the well-rendered speeches is a bit more variable, I'm afraid - although never so variable as to pull us out of the spell of one of Mamet's tightest dramatic constructions.

The best performance probably belongs to Phil Thompson, as Shelly "The Machine" Levene, a down-on-his-luck salesman who stumbles into what seems to be a big score. Levene may have not seemed quite pathetic enough in his opening scene, but Thompson spread his wings beautifully once back on top of the sleazy office heap, and his gulling of a particularly clueless mark was as ruthlessly hilarious as it should be. Perhaps only a small step behind was Michael Fisher as Roma, the role that won Joe Mantegna his Tony; oddly, Fisher is perhaps the more magnetic actor, and he certainly had Roma's smooth-talking surface down pat. But Fisher has only partly mined the wealth of emotional material in this character's soliloquies, which in their nihilist bravado - and sad groping after some sort of honor among thieves - rank among Mamet's best. Elsewhere there was nicely detailed work from Bob Mussett as that gullible mark, and thoughtful touches, if not full arcs, from Craig Houk and Michael Pevzner. Only Jeremy Browne disappointed, I'm afraid, as the seemingly spineless corporate suit in the corner office - largely because he has yet to tap into his character's surprisingly cold core.

As with Proof, the physical production was stylish and assured.  Designer Sean A. Cote pulled off convincing evocations of both a Chinese restaurant and the wrecked real estate office within the tiny confines of the BCA's Black Box; and the lighting and costumes were never less than apt. Glengarry Glen Ross counts as another feather in this young company's cap; and you've only got this weekend to catch it, if you want to be able to say you knew them before they hit it big.

The small town girl with the big city voice

Surprisingly, Jordan Hall was only two-thirds full last weekend for a rare Celebrity Series appearance by soprano Christine Brewer (at left).  But on closer inspection, it was apparent the entire crowd was made up of critics, musicians, and singers - so if Ms. Brewer doesn't have that much of a Boston following, at least what she has, as they say, is choice.

Still, there was a small murmur of dismay when it was announced that Ms. Brewer would be working without her announced accompanist - and that due to a cold, the concert would be somewhat abbreviated. So by the time the diva strode onstage in her shimmering concert-stage gown, with pianist Craig Terry by her side, expectations had been lowered to wind-chill-factor levels.

Yet all I can say is, if this is how she sounds when she's fighting a cold, I can't imagine what miracles this gal can accomplish when she's hale and hearty.  For Ms. Brewer revealed within seconds one of the most ravishing voices I've ever heard anywhere - so large, in fact, it all but amazed in an intimate space like Jordan Hall.  But her voice isn't just big, it's also deeply lustrous, and flexible yet forceful, without ever turning strident or shrill (except perhaps at the very top, where the cold was probably causing her some strain).  And again amazingly, there seems to be no "break" in her sound; it's glorious practically from top to bottom, and so spacious that listening to her is like moving into a huge, golden room - one you never really want to leave; plus she boasts a sense of pitch so secure that when Brewer gives a note all she's got you can feel a slight vibration sing through the structure of the hall.

The concert was, as a result, so delightful that I really don't have that much to say about it; for much of it I was just lost in pleasure; I think I actually may have been purring.  But for the record, Brewer warmed up with an aria from Gluck's Alceste (which pianist Terry wasn't quite ready to play, I don't think) before settling in with the composers she's a perfect match for: Wagner and Strauss.  From Wagner she sang the well-known song cycle "Wesendonck-Lieder" with a responsive authority that floated expertly from rapture to heartbreak and back (as pianist Terry likewise hit his stride).  And to tell true, the three songs from Strauss were even better; they seemed to represent some kind of peak of experience, artistry, and sheer talent; in fact I'm not sure I can really describe how good they were.

In the second half of the program, Brewer experimented with a variety of styles, and put her stamp on each one.  I could argue, if I felt like it, that with Britten's brilliant "Cabaret Songs" she may have put her foot slightly wrong; her voice is simply too big to slide easily in and out of the nearly-pop idiom of these witty numbers (the lyrics are by W.H. Auden).  But you know what?  I don't really feel like making that argument - Brewer caught the wit of the songs, and the feeling too, so who cares about the rest?  She shone even brighter in John Carter's "Cantata," which pushes the spiritual into grand opera territory (often to thrilling effect), and then demonstrated just how self-aware and funny she really is by tearing through a set of encores penned for other dames with big voices, people like Eileen Farrell and Kirsten Flagstad.  These proved to be the kind of songs that exhort us to love one another forever as we climb ev'ry mountain and fight on to the glorious dawn; they may be a hoot, but they're wonderful all the same (partly for being hoots), and Brewer sang the hell out of them.

For her own encore, the soprano charmed still further, with a sweet, all-but-forgotten song, "Mira," from the musical Carnival, about a homesick girl from a country town that's "very small - but still, it's there."  Brewer herself is from a little town outside St. Louis - which is a long way from the Met and Covent Garden; and I've heard that when she's not gracing stages like those (or ours), she still lives there.  And somehow, beneath the glories of Wagner and the wit of Britten, she communicated that, too.

Ralph Vaughan Williams and the setting of "Riders to the Sea."

It's hard to think of a better match between composer and subject than Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea.  And I'm quite sure the composer himself would agree, as in his libretto he hardly changed a word of Synge's text.  Indeed, the tragic one-act, set on the shores of Inishmore (above), one of the windswept islands of Aran on Ireland's western coast, distills Williams's life-long musical obsessions into drama with almost eerie simplicity.  Like the famed arranger of so many English folk tunes, Synge aimed to conjure the elemental mystery of the landscape through the harsh existence of those who lived upon it.  And things don't get much harsher than they do in Riders, in which a mother must suffer the sea's taking of her last living son (although even in the spoken version, the crushing blows land somehow musically, thanks to the lyricism of Synge's keening dialogue).

So the piece stands as one of the most direct translations from drama to opera in existence; and it has also become accepted as Vaughan Williams's greatest achievement in the form - yet it has become a rarity in performance. Its brevity works against it, perhaps - along with its intensity.  It's easy to pair two light operas to create a full evening, after all, but book-ending Riders to the Sea with a comedy would seem bizarre - and two tragedies of its power in a single night might lead some in the audience to slit their throats!

The Cantata Singers' solution to this problem was to offer a set of songs by Vaughan Williams (and others) as a prelude to their ambitious semi-staged production, which played in Jordan Hall for a single night last weekend.  The chorus, one of Boston's finest, is actually well-known for its ambition; under the direction of David Hoose, the Cantata Singers generally offer year-long explorations of a single composer or musical movement. Thus Riders was only a highlight of a season devoted to Vaughan Williams and his fellow travelers (except for the chorus's next concert, in which they're taking a vacation by mounting Bach's Mass in B Minor!).

The songs served well enough as an opener, I suppose; although lovely - and lonely - as they were, they still didn't hint at the real darkness to come.  Along with Vaughan Williams, we heard from Holst, Elgar, and Gerald Finzi (an undersung composer, so to speak, in my opinion).  The chorus was in solid, if not superb, form throughout - at their strongest in the numbers with the sturdiest melodic lines, like Vaughan William's famous arrangement of the poignant "Loch Lomond" (led here by a touching solo from Richard Simpson) and Finzi's wonderful "My Spirit Sang All Day" (the one beam of sun, perhaps, in the whole program).  Things were a bit more tentative in the slower and more complex textures of Holst's "The Evening-watch" and Vaughan Williams' settings from Shakespeare - although Hoose's direction, consistently subtle yet firm, still made everything worthwhile.

Then came Riders, which was staged (by Alexandra Borrie) with the orchestra surrounding the singers, just as the sea surrounds the opera's characters.  As stage metaphor, this was quite striking - and as musical metaphor it was striking, too, as most of Riders to the Sea is a kind of flowing recitative sourced in the motifs of the wind and waves.  Still, this theatrical coup came with a downside, for it must be noted that at times the singers had trouble cutting through the instrumental textures - even star mezzo Lynn Torgove, who took the central role of the mourning Maurya, sacrificed some of her complex timbre to the rise and fall of the winds (as well as an off-stage wind machine).  In the end, however, Torgove proved memorable in the role - dramatically she was just right, and vocally proved quite gripping in her final scene, when the score edges closest to pure aria.  There was also fine singing on offer from Lisa Lynch and Claire Filer as Maurya's despairing daughters, and under Hoose's direction, the instrumental ensemble sounded as strong, or stronger, than many a better-known local band.

All in all, I was quite taken with the thoughtfulness and care of the whole evening - and was sorry to hear it would only see one performance!  Lovers of choral music would do well to keep an eye out for the rest of the Cantata Singers' season - in particular the May concert, which features Bernstein's hauntingly gorgeous Chichester Psalms; if you've never heard them, just take my word for it - you want to.

Of Freud, fraud, and farce

Terry Johnson's Hysteria (now at the Central Square in a bright, cleverly-designed production from the Nora Theatre) is, I suppose, a car crash of different theatrical modes - but it's also something we never see anymore: a play of ideas.  Many ideas, in fact - perhaps more ideas than the playwright knew what to do with (or reconcile).  Jumping off from a single brief encounter between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí in 1938, Johnson attempts a pastiche of boulevard farce, surreal imagery, and a debate over the intellectual integrity of the founder of psychoanalysis - all  mashed up within one of the good doctor's morphine-induced dreams (perhaps his final one - Freud died from a morphine injection), in which guilt and self-doubt keep popping in and out of various psychological and metaphorical doors.

It's a bit like Stoppard in baggy pants, brandishing a banana peel, and if it sounds like too much - well, at times it is; still, despite a few strained moments in which the playwright awkwardly grinds opposing artistic gears, Hysteria mostly works - at times, in fact, it's even hysterical.  More importantly, it resonates, which plays almost never do anymore.

Why should this be?  Well, because Johnson understood the ingredients of his mash-up were all the stuff, shall we say, that dreams are made on: the chaos of farce is driven by repressed desires, as is Dalí's melting, death-and-sex imagery, as is the dream-state itself, as is analysis, too: combine the four and you have a multi-foliate structure that's expressing the same set of ideas in quadruplicate.  And this internal correspondence gives Johnson's script a heft, a kind of thickness, that even Stoppard, who's wittier and generally more sophisticated, doesn't seem able to conjure anymore.

The play opens on a dark and stormy night in Freud's London study - and the playwright has nudged the doctor's date with Dalí  to 1939, so air-raid sirens are rising through the rain, and Freud himself is in the last throes of terminal jaw cancer (all those cigars!), and receiving a shot of morphine from his distinguished neighbor, the scholar Abraham Yehuda (here, in another fudge, his personal physician).  Then he returns to a session of analysis - only where is the analysand?  The famous couch (below) is empty - could the good doctor, we wonder, have been attempting a last phase of his notorious self-analysis, before losing his train of thought?  Suddenly, however, there's a beautiful woman banging at the French doors, begging to be let in from the rain.  "I am your anima," she announces.

This is Freud on vacation - he took the couch with him.

Uh-huh.  Things only get stranger from there.  Within the moments, the girl has stripped down to her (Freudian) slip, then she's hidden (slam!) in a closet, then Dalí  appears, but soon he's down to his polka-dot boxers too, before jumping in the closet with the girl (slam!).

You get the idea, although trust me, most of the faux-Feydeau shenanigans are wittily brought off, and graced with surreal combinations of prop and costume.  And threaded through it all are cogent debates regarding Moses and Monotheism, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and especially Freud's famous "Dora" case, in which he concluded that a "hysteric" patient's claim of sexual harassment (at the hands of her father's middle-aged friend) was actually evidence of a repressed infantile attraction to him (and to her own father as well).

Ah, yes.  From this notorious case has sprung a veritable river of (mostly feminist) critique - and no wonder, as Freud's logic here so lucidly, if unconsciously, revealed the glaring flaws in his whole method.  In cases like "Dora," it's hard to ignore that while the good doctor claimed to be creating a brand new science, his conclusions were entirely based on intuition and inductive reasoning, with no empirical proof on offer - or even desired.  Indeed, Freud's first conclusion regarding Dora was the opposite of his final one; either could be deemed consistent with her testimony - and perhaps unsurprisingly, Freud was happy to not investigate the truth of her claims, but instead concoct an explanation that let the "man of means" (as he termed Dora's tormentor) off the hook.

Of course everyone admits now that psychoanalysis isn't a science - it's an art, or specifically, a form of literature.  Literature reformulated as diagnosis, I should say.  For as Freud didn't have any kind of statistical back-up for his theories (indeed, the number of cases forming the basis of psychoanalysis is hilariously small), he leaned heavily on analogies to literature to make his case.  Oedipus Rex, for instance, was once merely a play; Freud made it a theory (even a universal one!) as part of his marketing plan.

Old Sigmund really surpassed himself with the "Dora" case, however; indeed, he got almost everything about poor Ida Bauer ("Dora"'s actual name) completely wrong (he even decided at one point that she was a lesbian!).  Luckily (like several of his patients), clever Ida dropped Freud like a hot brick, confronted her father's friend over his behavior, and soon felt a whole lot better (at least for a time).

When is a cigar not a cigar?

And good for her!  Nevertheless, an entire phallo-centric theory had been launched under which generations of women would labor in self-incriminating delusion.  So Johnson's conjecture - that subconscious guilt would be weighing on the father of psychoanalysis at the end of his life - is eminently believable.  Just as the contrast between Freud and Dalí proves eminently inspired.  For as Freud affected to be free of ego, so Dalí affected to be pure ego, all while supposedly devoting himself to mining the "subconscious," too.  Thus they're like funhouse mirrors of one other, and their opposed forms of conceit (one dour, the other flamboyant) bounce off each other beautifully - plus John Kuntz is back in his best form here, complete with a wackily inconthithtent Catalan lisp and a clueless self-regard that's so innocent it's almost sweet (in the throes of love he even cries out his own name rather than his partner's). Indeed, when Freud delivers to the artist a withering critique ("You are killing the subconscious," he proclaims), you may find yourself suppressing a sympathetic little "Awww...." (Don't worry, though, Dalí gets his own back - soon the walls are melting.)

Meanwhile erstwhile farceur Richard Snee makes a fine, if perhaps too vigorous, Freud - he's all befuddled patriarchal gravitas, just a he should be - while Robert Bonotto (a frequent commenter here on the Hub Review) does appropriately exasperated work as Abraham Yehuda. Together these three keep the lively Nora Theatre production bubbling whenever they're onstage.  As "Jessica," the girl in the Freudian slip, however, the talented Stacy Fischer has a tougher challenge, and perhaps director Daniel Gidron hasn't been too great a help to her in meeting it.  Gidron's always better at farce than feeling, and yet he seems to have directed Fischer with an eye toward maximum contrast with the Keystone-Cops mechanics that surround her.  Thus Jessica is dolefully earnest throughout - which only exacerbates that sense of grinding gears when she comes center stage with her complaints about "Dora" (in another slight fudge, this particular psychological totem seems to be a conglomerate of several cases, but never mind).  Hard as it may be to believe, Jessica's psychological distress should really be a little funnier.

And at any rate we should keep some level of emotional distance from her - because history has played its own joke on Terry Johnson's comedy, I'm afraid.  Hysteria was written just after a high tide of anti-Freud feeling - in the 80's, Frederick Crews had methodically torn apart the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis, and Janet Malcolm had published In the Freud Archives; the intellectual case for repressed infantile sex fantasy seemed to be in tatters.

But then history, as it is wont to do, took a strangely ironic turn, leading many observers to wonder if Freud hadn't been onto something after all.  The rise of "Recovered Memory Therapy" (a debased mode of psychoanalysis) led to a rash of Dora-like accusations of sexual molestation - accusations that often resulted in high-profile lawsuits, court cases, and even some convictions.  Women in therapy began claiming their fathers had raped or sodomized them as children, or even subjected them to wild orgies and satanic masses.  And just a few years earlier, a similar wave of, well, hysteria had swept the day care industry (egged on by a few famous feminists) with fantastic charges of abuse  leveled at numerous day care providers (our own Fells Acres case was among the most notorious).

This time, of course, the women and children were believed - and families were torn apart, reputations were ruined, careers were destroyed, and innocent people were even imprisoned (sometimes for years) - even though over time, and under close scrutiny, almost all the claims cited in these proceedings fell completely apart.  The whole phenomenon, in fact, was something Freud would have predicted - it was a mass acting-out of repressed infantile sex fantasy.

This, of course, doesn't mean that all women are lying about their childhood sexual abuse - it simply means that not all of them are telling the truth.  Freud assumes one thing; feminism the other; both are guilty of a cardinal sin of inductive reasoning.  Perhaps it's too much to expect that Terry Johnson might have anticipated this final turn in Freudian history in Hysteria; but you kind of leave the show wishing he'd realized that every farce has its final twist.