Playwright: Anthony Neilson. At: Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway. Telephone: 773-549-1815; $25, $30 . Runs through: May 10
Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia is a bizarre, frustrating and cryptic play. And in that, it perfectly mimics the more crippling forms of mental illness—perhaps too well. Watching the first act is akin to watching somebody else's hallucination: all weirdness and no context. The second act is elliptical and repetitive; nothing is resolved or clarified. It feels unfinished, as if Neilson forgot to attach the third act.
It's a curious piece at best and, in its odd homage to Alice and Wonderland ( with echoes of The Phantom Tollbooth ) , it gets curiouser and curiouser as protagonist Lisa ( Somer Benson ) travels to a mad-hatter dystopia in search of an hour she lost somewhere between New York and London. The most intriguing thing about Dissocia isn't whether Lisa will succeed in her quest to for the missing hour—it's why Profiles included such an alienating, surreal non-starter in its season.
That said, the Dissocia does contain a moment of singular, breathtaking value. It comes in the second act, in a shard of dialogue that puts the encyclopedic medi-speak of the DSM—the medical professional's Bible when it comes to diagnosing mental illness—to shame. In a single sentence, Neilson eloquently captures one of the eternal Gordian knots of mental-illness treatment. The cure and the sanity it restores often feels worse than the disease. Why should anyone suffering from mania take his or her lithium when they know the drug will rob him or her of endless, exhilarating highs?
Yes, going off her medication is a recipe for disaster, Lisa ( Somer Benson ) acknowledges. But it's only without drugs that she can access her private, wild universe of endless possibility. Refusing meds is like succumbing to the lure of the sirens, Lisa tells her frustrated sister. " [ You ] know … the ship will get all smashed up. But it's worth it."
In depicting Lisa's situation, Neilson offers two completely disconnected acts. After the down-the-rabbit-hole hallucinatory violence of the first act, comes a silent, sterile hospital room and roughly 40 minutes of watching a silent parade of health care workers cajole Lisa into swallowing her pills.
Director Darrell W. Cox manages to pull committed performances from a cast burdened with roles that seem like the fantasy of a disturbed six-year-old. The audience might be totally confounded ( and completely annoyed ) by Lisa's nonsensical adventures dropping bombs from a jerry-rigged laundry basket, listening to the screams of an anal-rape victim and facing down a lover/monster whose climactic appearance is never explained, but the cast pours everything it has into these antics. When, for instance, a pants-free fellow suddenly starts hopping about while waggling a hotdog in front of his crotch, he manages to instill an ardent sincerity into a moment that is abrasively, eye-rollingly stupid.
Sincerity notwithstanding, it's impossible to recommend Dissocia. Lisa may have lost an hour. There's no reason for audiences to do so as well.