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4.48 Psychosis

T<B>he hour of the morning in the title of Sarah Kane's final play, "4.48 Psychosis," refers to the time when the brain's chemical imbalance peaks, when not only desperation visits but also sanity and sobering clarity. And it's that lucidity and absence of self-pity that make this searing one-hour rumination on clinical depression and suicide such an unsettling shock of experimental theater. Impossible as it is to experience this dark missive from the outer reaches of despair without factoring in the author's suicide at 28 soon after it was completed, the reductive tag attached to Kane of a contemporary Sylvia Plath only undermines the weight of this uncompromising, bleakly prescient work.</B>

The hour of the morning in the title of Sarah Kane’s final play, “4.48 Psychosis,” refers to the time when the brain’s chemical imbalance peaks, when not only desperation visits but also sanity and sobering clarity. And it’s that lucidity and absence of self-pity that make this searing one-hour rumination on clinical depression and suicide such an unsettling shock of experimental theater. Impossible as it is to experience this dark missive from the outer reaches of despair without factoring in the author’s suicide at 28 soon after it was completed, the reductive tag attached to Kane of a contemporary Sylvia Plath only undermines the weight of this uncompromising, bleakly prescient work.

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While Kane’s five plays have been widely produced in Europe, they remain underseen in the U.S., particularly in New York. This rigorously staged production from London’s Royal Court, which introduced the play in 2000, arrives with original director James Macdonald and designer Jeremy Herbert for a six-city U.S. tour; it’s at UCLA’s Freud Theater Nov. 4-7.

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Written with only minimal stage directions — (Silence) is the most used — and without plot or traditionally defined characters, the play reads more like free-form verse than dramaturgy. And while Macdonald’s production casts three actors as its overlapping voices, it might have been equally blistering as a monologue.

Kane’s language is both florid and spare, bereft of hope yet oddly stirring, sorrowful and sardonically humorous. It creates starkly beautiful poetry out of abject pain and an aching hunger for love, which is as central a theme here as death.

What’s perhaps most disturbing is that the death wish emanating from the figures onstage is not so much a desire to die or even a wish to be understood. Instead, it’s a clear-eyed acceptance of the fact that being understood will change nothing, that drug treatments are just false buffers for an inescapable anguish and that the need to vanish will not be negated.

The penultimate line of the play is: “It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.” What “4.48 Psychosis” represents, however, is a confronting journey inside a brilliant but tormented mind. Kane’s character(s) — and by inevitable extension, the playwright herself — in many ways refuse both self-examination and outside access, but they seem, by some reflex of externalization, to demand it with almost primal force.

Switching roles between patient, doctor and witness in what appears to be a mental illness clinic, the three actors — original cast member Jo McInnes, fellow Brit Jason Hughes and American Marin Ireland — bring an angry, raw fluidity to Kane’s disjointed words, whether as a chorus or as sparring disembodied voices.

Almost entirely free of naturalistic dialogue, the text ranges from a terse litany of personal failings to a spew of distrust about doctors and their methods; from outbursts of angry reproach against an absent God and painful acknowledgements of loss and elusive love to self-recrimination; from long lists of symptoms, diagnoses and drug treatments to obsessive loops of repetitive thought, random numbers and dissociated verbs of violence: “flash, flicker, slash, burn, wring, press, dab, slash….” All of this is punctuated by unnerving, extended silences.

The achievement of director Macdonald and his cast is far from automatic in weaving together something cogent from this expressionistic outpouring, which, despite the meticulousness with which Kane clearly has weighed every word, remains as fragmented as it is brutally lyrical. (Associate director of the Royal Court, Macdonald will be represented Off Broadway in December with the New York Theater Workshop’s production of Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” starring Sam Shepard and Dallas Roberts.)

A model of austere functionality, Herbert’s set consists of one free-standing chair and another behind a basic white table on a white stage. The entire field is reflected to arresting effect in a slanted, full-stage overhead mirror, which adds considerably to the uneasy feeling of being given a prolonged glimpse inside the hell of a disturbed mind.

Seamlessly integrated with video projections of passing figures, traffic outside a window or static snow, Nigel Edwards’ original lighting designs also are a key contribution, manipulating the imagery with precise shifts between cold blues, the flickering light of a television, a dark pit pierced by a single spot and sharp transitions to blinding whiteness.

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4.48 Psychosis

St. Ann's Warehouse; 254 seats; $45 top

  • Production: An Arts at St. Ann's, David Eden Prods. Presentation, in association with Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, of the Royal Court Theater production of a play in one act by Sarah Kane. Directed by James Macdonald.
  • Crew: Sets, Jeremy Herbert; lighting, Nigel Edwards; costumes, Iona Kendrick; sound, Paul Arditti; audiovisual technician, Ian Dickinson Reviewed, opened Oct. 26, 2004. Runs through Oct. 31. Running time: 1 HOUR.
  • Cast: With: Jason Hughes, Marin Ireland, Jo McInnes.

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