April 14-20, 2005

theater

Time After Time

by Toby Zinman

This remarkable play by Sarah Kane has found a remarkable production under the direction of Shannon O'Donnell: It is an intense hour of first-rate theater without any fancy sets, props or costumes — nothing but sheer talent and imagination.

That said, it should also be said that it is a play about suicidal psychosis in which the pain of being tortured to death by your own mind is the action and the subject. And that said, it should also be said that it is surprisingly interesting and sometimes even funny, brimming with extraordinary insights that have as much to do with the spectator as with the character. The title refers to the hour in the morning when terrible clarity seems to emerge from the night's torment, "when sanity visits / for one hour and 12 minutes I am in my right mind. / When it has passed, I shall be gone again, / a fragmented puppet, a grotesque fool."

There are three actors representing those fragments, although looking at the script one realizes this is the director's decision, since nothing in the text indicates who says which lines. Amanda Schoonover gives a brilliant, high-risk, very disciplined performance as the central figure, the "I" who can articulate both her longing for happiness and the absurdity of being able to understand what is wrong with her yet be helpless to fix it. We watch the failure of love and of therapy ("there's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful") to hold her back from the inevitable conclusion.

Stacey Wylie, in a white slip, plays a kind of feminine principle — the lover, the mother, the nurturer — who is also an aspect of the central character. Kristyn Chouiniere plays a kind of masculine principle — the doctor, the fighter — who is another aspect of the central character. All three women perform the expressionistic choreography (created by Jen Schoonover) with grace and strength. Christopher Colucci's haunting, often charming music creates an aural, internal world.

Sarah Kane's play, the last of the six she wrote, is too good to be merely a focus of morbid cult-devotion after her suicide in 1999 at the age of 28. That she found a way to make the destructive psychosis of her life the creative impulse of her art is a triumph, and Theater Catalyst has done Kane and themselves proud.

4.48 PSYCHOSIS Through April 22, Theater Catalyst at The Playground at The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330