THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY

I’m a little embarrassed now that the last four posts on this blog are from me, but I want to get this down before I forget. This past Friday, Alyssa and I attended a school production of the play 4.48 Psychosis by British playwright Sarah Kane. It is a very different type of play as the progression of the play is not a sequence of events, but rather a step up into a stream of consciousness in the mind of someone with the mental illness of bipolar disorder. Also, it is different in the fact that there are only 5 unnamed characters throughout the play. One a doctor and the other four different parts of the affected main character’s mind. The production was in a small rehearsal space in the basement of the Thomas Hunter building. The staging was very experimental, as the audience was standing throughout the production and did not remain in a fixed position. Rather, the audience walked around the room to focus on different characters representing the jumping of the mind of the main character from one state of being to another.

From a critical point of view, I think that the cast worked well with the space they were provided, but I think that the staging could have been done a little better involving less movement of the audience yet still directing the audience’s attention to different areas of the space while still achieving the effect of an unstable mind. I do have to commend the student actors on their production of this show, they took a very different kind of play and did a great job of putting it together. However, you could notice the fact that the actors were students and not professional actors. But then again, they are students and are still in the midst of their training. The students interpreted their characters with amazing emotional intensity, making the audience really feel the anguish the character was going through with the dilemma of a deteriorating mind.

One thing that could have been done better in my opinion, in terms of acting, was articulation. Some of the monologues were a little too fast paced and parts were incomprehensible. I understand that they were trying to represent the frenzy going on in the protagonist’s mind, however the audience needs to understand what you are saying. Also, another thing I think could have been done a little bit better, is the distinction of the different parts of the mind to the audience. There were two different states of mind that I could not distinguish which one was which throughout the entire play. Those two were Mania and Psychosis. I understand the fact that the actors have only the dialogue provided to them by the playwright, but I feel that the actors interpretation of those lines could have been done differently in order to make the distinction between those two characters more recognizable. Despite these minor disagreements in production technique, I overall enjoyed this experimental short play. I believe it was a good choice in topic. Also, I think the student team that produced the show did well with the parameters of performance they had to work with. The actors made the audience feel what the characters were going through with an emotional connectivity on a level that is hard to reach. It also gives the audience an idea of the anguish that people with mental illnesses do go through on a daily basis. Good job Hunter College student-actors!

P.S. I posted a delicious link with a UK review of a different production of the play. It may give people a better sense of what the play is about than my response. Check it out, the play is very interesting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 12:16 am and is filed under