Sarah Kane's last play returns in a critically acclaimed production directed by Beau O'Reilly.
Directed by Curious co-founder Beau O'Reilly, 4:48 Psychosis is a raw yet poetically rendered look inside a clinically depressed, determinedly suicidal mind....
Curious Theatre Branch is adept at providing their audiences with ways to make sense of abstract or absurd material without ever dictating to those audiences how to think or feel about anything, and 4:48 Psychosis is no exception. What is the most disturbing here for me is that I find myself rooting for the "madness." I don't want the "conscience" to die, but the "madness," as played by Kelly Anchors, is the artist full of passion and linguistic flourishes. The "madness" exhibits a sort of a wide-eyed pessimism that anyone who has experienced the difference between common unhappiness and major depression will recognize instantly....
There are some pacing issues... but the Curious Theatre Branch production of 4:48 Psychosis is riveting, disturbing, and haunting. Sarah Kane's last script offers few judgments and no answers: Anchors and Bhattacharya are two incomplete parts of a whole person who join together to make a still incomplete person. In the end, 4:48 Psychosis seems to be Kane's documentation of her spending up her last bit of the emotional fuel she needed to fight for life against the enchantment of the gloom.—Chicago Stage Review
As staged by Beau O'Reilly, 4:48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane's exploration of depression and suicide—and the last play she wrote before hanging herself in 1999—is ironically lively, sometimes humorous, and always thought-provoking. In the lead role, Kelly Anchors reveals the mental state of the clinically depressed at 4:48 AM, "when desperation visits."—Chicago Reader
"Suicides have a special language," wrote Anne Sexton in her poem "Wanting to Die." "Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build." Sexton took her own life ten years after writing those words. By contrast, Sarah Kane's last play, 4:48 Psychosis, only got its first production after she hanged herself in 1999 at age 28 - and the too-close-for-comfort parallels between the mental breakdown of the play's nameless protagonist and the self-destruction of its author seem to have discomfited critics even more than similar writings by Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In his review of the Royal Court premiere, Michael Billington of the Guardian asked "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?"
Well, perhaps you do it by recognizing Kane's tools and her special language, filled with blistering wit, unforgiving self-laceration, and a fearless commitment to finding "an instant of clarity before eternal night." But make no mistake—even as finely tuned a production of 4:48 Psychosis as the one staged for Curious Theatre Branch by Beau O'Reilly in this year's Rhino Fest takes a willingness on the part of viewers to "stare into the night until the night stares back," as O'Reilly once sang in the Chicago art-rock cabaret band, Maestro Subgum and the Whole. You may well emerge with your psychic eyeballs singed.
Five performers in shades of white and cream perform the text, which is written as a fragmented monologue. (The title refers to the early-morning hour when the psychological demons would awaken Kane.) Pale, angular, and androgynous, Kelly Anchors takes on what one presumes is the predominant Kane voice, alternately pleading for understanding and sparring with psychiatrists. In a demolishment of the Hollywood patient-therapist dynamic embodied by Good Will Hunting, Anchors responds to a doctor's assertion that "It's not your fault" with "You've said it so much I'm beginning to think it is my fault."
Jayita Bhattacharya's physically energetic performance serves as the manic counterpoint to Anchors' verbally intense depressive, with the rest of the ensemble serving largely as choral voices. (Be warned that the audience is brought into the proceedings late in the show as well, heightening the uncomfortable sense of voyeurism.) Kane clearly saw her struggle to hang onto the "beautiful pain that says I exist" against the numbing interventions of psychiatric medicines as an act of artistic defiance. Whether or not one lends any credence to that viewpoint, seeing this intelligent and sharp-elbowed take on Kane's last work makes one wish she had found a reason to keep building.—Chicago Tribune
