Hysteria. Playscript: Terry Johnson. Direction: Jiri Zizka. Wilma Theater. Philadelphia, PA / USA. 20 May 2009

“I CHOSE TO THINK NOT FEEL.” This line is Freud’s desperate plea in defense of his most controversial lifeworks in Terry Johnson’s masterfully complex play Hysteria that opened at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia May 20 to make its east coast debut.

In the final moments of his life, Sigmund Freud must come face to face with the negative implications of his theories regarding the sexuality of his female case studies and legitimacy of Jewish faith. This trial of sorts is held in Freud’s study, recreated piece by piece in his London home from his original study in Vienna. His accusers are a mysterious young woman named Jessica who can’t keep her clothes on and Yahuda, his personal physician. His defender is Salvador Dali, the famous Spanish artist who has made a pilgrimage to the man he sees as the patron saint of surrealist art, so that he can request his personal opinion of Dali’s latest painting. What sets this play apart is that it raises difficult questions about how a culture assigns values for truth and beauty and who has the privileged authority to define these values.

The first of the play’s three acts is styled as an affectionate tribute to British boulevard farce and there are several allusions to this genre in the script including a specific reference to Rookery Nook which coincidentally is being produced under the direction of Terry Johnson in London while Hysteria is playing here in Philadelphia. The second act transitions into a tense confrontation between characters that leads to a dark revelation of suffering in the young woman’s life. The third and final act transforms the set and the dialogue into a surrealist collage of design and movement that physically manifest Freud’s thought. Each of the three acts stands alone in style yet they seamlessly integrated in a way that can aptly be compared to the id, ego and superego of the human psyche.

The dynamic Alvin Epstein who plays the comical and conflicted cultural icon, Sigmund Freud, in his dying days, is joined by Mary McCool as Jessica is actually a composite character of Freud’s female case studies. With them is Mervin Goldsmith in the part of another composite character based partly on Freud’s physician and partly on Abraham Yahuda, a Jewish scholar and friend to Freud. Completing the four-hander is Mathew Floyd Miller as the eccentric Spaniard artist Salvador Dali a contemporary and admirer of Freud who sought out the aging psychologist for a critique of his work.

When Freud confesses that he “chose to think, not feel” it is in response to Jessica’s demands that he explain a decision to suppress an unpopular theory that would have implicated many men of Europe’s upper class in child abuse and molestation. Freud explains that presenting his case study findings in this light would have undermined his theory of childhood sexuality while finding guilty many respected fathers “not even excluding [his] own”. 

But while Jessica fights to make certain ideas public, Yahuda insists that he silence others. “It’s a bad time to discourage men to believe in God” argues Yahuda in one of many attempts to dissuade Freud from publishing his last work. The discouragement is an allusion is to the highly controversial book Moses and Monotheism in which Freud applies his theories of psychoanalysis on Old Testament scripture and reinterprets the origins of Moses and some aspects of Judaism that he understands as being based on feelings of shared guilt by the followers who murdered Moses. The particularly “bad time” that Yahuda refers to is Kristallnacht on which the play is set.

With these debates, the true identity of Jessica is revealed and the audience, like Freud, will be pulled between whether to value thought over feelings.   

For the most part however, the message of defining and defending truth is not heavy handed since so many slapstick gags cushion it. The alarm and embarrassed confusion played out in farcical style reminds us these iconic characters were also very much human. Some of these gags however seem childishly gratuitous like when the line “It’s not” is a pun for the presence of nasal mucous.

That’s not a major drawback, since the absurdities lend themselves to the ever-present psychoanalysis and surrealist art criticism woven naturally into this meta-theatrical show. While the play is certainly cerebral, it playfully warns against taking its style too seriously. Dali dismissingly lets us in on the secret that “Surrealism is impossible to understand”.

Epstein and McCool bring an animated courageousness to their performance that must be deeply philosophical one moment and zany the next. The supporting actors Goldsmith and Miller convincingly personify these opposing perspectives with intellectual imperiousness and riotous self-expression, respectively. Still, there are times when you wish these two characters had been written with more depth and less two-dimensionality.

“Have I caught what we are chasing?”, asks Dali of Freud who has finally agreed to critique the artist’s latest piece Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Freud answers that he sees only consciousness in Dali’s style and that he can find more evidence of unconscious desire in the landscapes and still-lives of the classical painters. “You murder dreams,” says Freud. The audience will have to decide for themselves whether Johnson falls victim to the same blunder as Dali or if he authentically depicts his protagonist’s unconscious in the surrealism of the third act.

The surrealist playwright however, in an advantage over the painter has built into the dialogue a defense in anticipation of a criticism of contrived form. Should the mind-bending action that unfolds be found unduly cliché, they can be attributed to his protagonist’s guilt and obsession, his dementia, or to the effects of the drugs his physician administers in his assisted suicide. But Terry Johnson does not hide behind these devices and from the very first lines he challenges viewers to define their own role in the play. He invites the audience to participate if they choose, if only by remaining silent. “The silence is all yours; and it is more eloquent than you can imagine”.

True to form, Freud forces his audience to explore their own reactions. When the farce is successful the reaction is laughter, but when the darker side of humanity is revealed silence may be an earful.