In “Hysteria,” an urgent knock on the garden doors of his London study stirs Sigmund Freud from his ruminations. The year is 1938 and the Father of Psychoanalysis and his family have recently fled Nazi occupied Austria.
* * * cerebral farce
None too pleased, Freud tells the uninvited guest to “go away.” The young woman doesn’t. And over the course of British playwright Terry Johnson’s heady and humorous work — first performed in London in 1993 — we learn that Jessica is there to challenge Freud’s theories of sexuality and perhaps settle a score.
Adept at presenting teasingly cerebral plays, the concludes its season with this challenging quasi-comedy about a brilliant thinker forced to rethink his greatest (but hardly unassailable) works as death nears.
The cast is an accomplished one, with Chris Kendall taking the lead as Freud. Joining Lauren Bahlman’s Jessica in bedeviling the good doctor are his physician, Abraham Yahuda (Jim Hunt), and an impetuous fool of an artist by the name of Salvador Dali (Michael Bouchard).
Each wants something from Freud. Jessica is bent on taking him to task for his theories of sexuality. Yahuda is dismayed by his friend and patient’s use of Moses in his final book, “Moses and Monotheism.” Dali wants confirmation of his own genius from his idol, whose “Interpretation of Dreams” influenced him.
Kendall delivers a Freud who, despite cancer of the jaw, is sharp-minded and contemplative even when injected with morphine by a black-clad figure in the play’s shadowy opening. He can also be prickly.
Johnson has written a fitful work — which seems fitting. Like a sleeper in the midst of an uncanny dream, it twists between farce and something terrifying. It is also mildy aggravating. It is no easy feat to toggle between the absurd and the harrowing (the rape of a child is a theme ). Under the direction of Michael Stricker, the play pulls off the ridiculous better than it does the painful.
Even so, “Hysteria” is the sort of work that when it ends, you may want to see again. Did all those breadcrumbs really lead to the endpoint?
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
