There’s good news and bad news about the City Repertory Theatre production of “Hysteria,” the 1993 farce/dark comedy by British playwright Terry Johnson.
The bad news: The lobster phone is kaput. Finito. Excised. Exorcized.
Director John Sbordone acknowledged the sad news in an enigmatic April 16 email to cast and crew: “Sorry about the lobster phone,” the text read, accompanied by a yellow-face emoji shedding a tear.
“We do, however, need the sound effects and the wooden phallus,” the email continued.
The good news – that the wooden phallus has been procured! – was revealed by Sbordone during a round-table interview with him, the cast and . . . er, “Dali” himself (see below) a week before the opening of the play, which runs tonight (April 26) through Sunday May 5 at the troupe’s Palm Coast black box venue.
“We’ve cut the lobster phone,” Sbordone said, cryptically adding: “There was a Dali-ian meltdown. It’s outside our budget (to replace it).”
Meanwhile, in the course of the interview held before a rehearsal, the wooden phallus was unveiled: It’s a stumpy, dull ebony-colored beastie with red racing stripes.
“We got it on Amazon, of course,” Sbordone said. “The least expensive good sculpture was $66. The most expensive was 22 grand – or maybe it was $2,200.”
Lobster phone? An arty wooden phallus? Dali-ian meltdown? What the hell is going on?
That phallic beastie is the symbolic key, given that it’s just the sort of objet d’erotica that would surface at a meet-up between Sigmund Freud, the sex-obsessed “father of psychoanalysis,” and Salvador Dali, the master surrealist artist – and who happen to be two of the four characters in Johnson’s “Hysteria.”
Johnson drew his inspiration from an actual, historically documented meeting between the 81-year-old Freud and the 34-year-old Dali in July 1938, just weeks after Freud had escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna to settle in London. The meeting was arranged by their mutual friend Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer.
Dali, fascinated by Freud’s theories about dreams and the subconscious, had long desired to meet his idol. For show-and-tell with Sigmund, Dali brought his latest painting, “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” and what he considered to be a serious, scientific article he had published on paranoia.
During their meeting, the brash, flamboyant surrealist even drew several sketches of Freud, and each man would reflect on their encounter in subsequent writings.
Freud wrote to Zweig the day after the meeting: “. . . I was inclined to look upon the surrealists – who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint – as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol) cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.”
In his 1941 memoir, Dali revealed the flash of insight that led him to create a post-meeting portrait that depicted the psychotherapist with a bulbous head: “Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extracted with a needle!”
But Johnson’s play is not a docudrama of the Freud-Dali summit. Indeed, even describing “Hysteria” (a title which comes from Freud’s psycho-sexual theories) as a farce/dark comedy is a reductive statement akin to saying the pope is Catholic.
In Johnson’s work, Freud (portrayed in the City Rep production by Tom Munez) and Dali (played by Cameron Hodges, who throughout the interview stayed in character, replete with outrageous mustache) are joined by Abraham Yahuda (Danno Waddell), a character Johnson based on a real-life Jewish scholar with Iraqi roots. In the play, as in actual life, Yahuda tries to persuade Freud not to publish his “speculative and imaginary” final book, “Moses and Monotheism” – which argued that both were of Egyptian, rather than Jewish, origin.
“Throughout the play, Freud is dealing with guilt – this is the end of his life and many of his theories have been undermined or debunked, such as the penis envy of daughters leads to erratic behavior, to hysteria,” Sbordone said. “Freud does not want to give up his theories, and yet he is confronted constantly with the reality that they cannot be true.”
Munez prepared for a previous production of “Hysteria” at an Oviedo theater by cracking open Freud’s 1917 book, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” but his effort at research soon became a slog, he said: “I could hardly get through it. You start reading and you’re like ‘Oooh, wait a minute. Research is nice but this is going to be tough.’ ”
Dali’s agenda in the play, meanwhile, is to worship and impress his hero.
“He – by that I mean we, Dali and I, have come to visit Freud and to reach out and to understand from the demigod of all things of the unconscious, and to show him the work I have done for all things paranoic,” said Hodges/Dali, his faux-Spanish accent and bombastic mustache indicating that, for this interview, “Dali” has taken control of the actor’s brain.
“Freud is our patron saint, and I need for him to gaze upon the efforts made by true disciples of all things cryptical paranoid,” “Dali” said.
The male trio is disrupted by the arrival of a woman named Jessica (played by Emily Sowell in her City Rep debut). For personal reasons, Jessica is determined to confront Freud about his theories, to the point where she strips down to her lingerie (a Freudian slip?) to get his attention – or unsettle him.
And so, with a scantily clad woman running around the stage, “Hysteria” earns its street cred as a farce.
“Jessica goes through a very wide variety of tones in the play,” Sowell said. “In the beginning, she shows up as this kind of mysterious woman and you don’t know what her purpose is. It’s very farcical, like ‘Noises Off’ (the 1982 farce by English playwright Michael Frayn). She’s in her lingerie for a while, and people are popping in and out of closet doors.”
(Semi-spoiler alert: Jessica is not the only character who winds up sans clothes.)
Then, Sowell added, the play “starts to delve into the reason why Jessica is actually here talking to Freud.”
The tone of the play shifts dramatically, in all senses of that word, as the dark side of Freud’s sexual theories comes to the fore – and, as if the arty phallus isn’t enough, propels the play into mature-audience territory.
“The play is heavy at the end – there’s no other way to put it,” Munez said.
“This is one of the funniest things that CRT has ever done,” Sbordone said. “It’s hilarious because of Dali and his interactions with Freud, Yahuda and Jessica. And it’s as serious a show as we’ve ever done.
“Thank God for Dali,” who “bursts in on moments” when the play turns disturbing and dark, Sbordone added. “Yes, we call it a dark comedy.”
The play has also been called an “intellectual farce,” Sbordone said. “It “reminds us that farce can be a vehicle for ideas. I think if the audiences don’t run away from the penises, they’re going to laugh their asses off and go out crying.”
“Hysteria,” at City Repertory Theatre, at 7:30 p.m. April 26-27 and May 3-4, and 3 p.m. April 28 and May 5. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $20 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.
Chris Max says
Amazing, we laughed and got shaken to our core. This was my first time attending this intimate theatre and will definitely become a regular. Thank you to the cast and crew for a memorable evening.