Phillyist Reviews... Hysteria

Perhaps the thing with which I've struggled most, when it comes to Terry Johnson's Hysteria, onstage through this weekend at the Wilma Theater, is how to describe it. What starts off as a traditional door-slamming farce—albeit one tinged with Freudian overtones—that presents the unlikely pairing of Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí eventually vacillates between absurdism and the completely surreal, the farce all but forgotten by the show's close. Taken in parts, these elements work, but combined, it becomes difficult to determine whether the play is clever or disjointed, let alone to determine whether I actually enjoyed it.

Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy at least elements of the play. Mary McCool was her usually charming self (this time largely naked or semi-naked); Matthew Floyd Miller was everything one could possibly want from a dramatized Dalí; and Alvin Epstein looked and acted the part of Freud (although he seemed a bit lethargic onstage—possibly explained by the fact that he was apparently getting sick and would have to take several performances off shortly after I saw the play). The set design by Mimi Lien was fantastic, and Jerold R. Forsyth's lights and Nick Rye's sound were completely faultless. And choppy though Johnson's script it is, the dialogue is well-written and painstakingly researched.

It's just that when you sit down in a theatre, and the lights go down and the (metaphorical) curtain goes up and you find yourself watching a comedy in the style of Moliere in Act One, you don't really want to come back after intermission and find that you're now in the middle of The Bald Soprano-meets-The Persistence of Memory. It's jarring, with an end result of each half diminishing the impact of the other. I didn't dislike it; I just didn't know, ultimately, what to make of it.

But perhaps a session of good, old-fashioned Freudian analysis could help me with that.

Matthew Floyd Miller as Salvador Dalí and Alvin Epstein as Sigmund Freud in Hysteria, onstage at the Wilma Theater through June 14. Photo by Jim Roese.