Fringe Festival "4.48 Psychosis" review by ChaimEliyahu

Tragic Madness

Rating: 4

4.48 Psychosis

KC Fringe Festival

Let's be clear: Sarah Kane's "4.48 Psychosis" script, first produced in London in 2000, offers little respite from the surreality of madness. This is a tragedy. Be prepared.

But even when tragedy fails to lighten things up, it illuminates. In this, director Dan Born and his passionate four actors and crew have succeeded.

As the director explains in his program notes, "the script has no stage directions, no set descriptions, not even a cast list or assigned roles." In this, his second staging of this work, Born has divided the script into multiple parts and sub-parts, portrayed by four actors. Two play identifiable roles throughout: Samantha Raines as patient and Nandini MacMillan as therapist in our dramatic madhouse. Their two onstage companions — Misty Nuckolls and Andrew Stowers — keep us jumping, clearly mad at most moments — either as co-inmates, or as aspects of our patient's troubled inner landscape — but always as tormenting and tormented voices that shift and change in the frightening uncertainty of desperate insanity. Later, they appear in white coats, clearly now clinicians, though not so clearly less mad. And in one final vignette, as — well, you'll see, and let me not spoil that moment.

Tech arrangements, though simple, support this shifting psychological environment. Our therapist spends most of her time talking and listening to an empty chair, just offstage. Our three inmates fall to the floor, scrawling their inner scribblings in chalk on the black floor, or trying to wipe them out. Lights shift from glaring to dim, white to red-and-green. Sound-bleed was a problem on opening night, with the emphatic footsteps of traditional Indian dancers upstairs in an art-packed building, making me think there was some kind of soundtrack that didn't really work.

No sound track. Only the voices of a life coming unbound, unbundled and lost in insanity. Thanks to EMU Theatre for taking us there, and for letting us go.  Repeating Thursday at 6:30 and Saturday at 8 at 1818 McGee.

read the review at KC Stage