Playwright: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
At: Experimental Theatre Chicago at the Chopin, 1543 W. Division St.
Phone: (312) 388-7660; $15
Runs through: Aug. 22
As we enter the theater, we are greeted by an assortment of pale and drooling lunatics, twitching and squirming and making eccentric noises. Since this is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to playgoers versed in European drama of the last century, we anticipate discovering that a) the hospital administrators are corrupt and/or hypocritical and the inmates, creepy but fundamentally humane, b) somebody we think sane will turn out to be crazy, or vice-versa, and c) everyone will speak in the stilted English characteristic of inept scholarly translations.
We are not disappointed: Alexander Walpurg, a brilliant poet, has checked himself into an asylum. One of his doctors feels that the new Freudian psychoanalysis—this is 1923—might help the violent genius resolve the erotocentric conflicts from which (yawn) all irrationality springs. To this end, a young nun is brought to his cell and left there for the night, during which she quickly succumbs to his charismatic casuistry, emerging as his willing sex-slave. But when they are—no surprise—caught in the act, the plot takes what playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz probably thought was an unforeseen twist.
The World envisioned as a prison, a brothel or a mental institution, while enjoying long service as a framing device for the Literature of Dissent, are metaphors nowadays grown threadbare with overuse. Some interesting ironies—or a few entertaining moments, at least—might still have been salvaged from Witkiewicz' no-longer-timely observations, but something appears to have gone awry in the time between director Jaclyn Biskup's initial infatuation with the expressionistic drama and the execution of this Experimental Theatre Chicago production.
Biskup might have imposed an imaginative reading on her text (a technique successfully applied to Paula Vogel's contemporary but likewise dreary Desdemona last season), or enhanced it with extravagant scenic motifs, as in its original production, instead of making do with geisha-face makeup and skimpy silhouette screens that randomly light up like fireflies. She does not, however, and so the actors struggle in vain to liberate Witkiewicz' desiccated didactics from an academic ambiance as inert as any shackled, sedated and straitjacketed bedlamite.