Through Sept. 17 only, Stone Soup Theatre Company presents a riveting, well-staged production of Sarah Kane’s “4.48 Psychosis.” It continues at downtown’s 10th Avenue Theatre (930 10th Ave. just south of Broadway) at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, call (760) 434-9363 or visit www.stonesouptheatre.net.
Kane, a young British playwright who set the London theatre world afire with her performance texts, committed suicide in 1999. Al Germani’s Lynx Performance Theatre produced her earlier work, “Crave,” in March. Of the two, “Crave” is the more brutal. By the time she wrote “4.48 Psychosis,” perhaps the playwright had come to a modicum of peace with her mental illness, although director Rebecca Johannsen, a Ph.D. candidate in theater at UC Irvine, says it would be a mistake to consider the play Kane’s suicide note.
Nonetheless, the poignant and poetic hour-long work, though painful to watch, is not devoid of hope. However, it is not a piece of light entertainment or theater to which one would take just any friend. Hopefully, it will imbue some with even more understanding of the anguish of mental illness as experienced from the inside.
Therese Schneck and Olivia Espinosa portray two sides of the same institutionalized woman, whose only visitor is an incompetent and ultimately bungling psychotherapist (Steve Hohman). She resists the proffered panacea of drugs, and then, having capitulated, graphically describes how each makes her feel. Her meditations on the overwhelming task of living include the hope that the noisy busy-ness of it all ceases at the moment of death; and that then, at last, there will be silence and love, and she will meet and be united with the self she has never known.
Currently, Eveoke Dance Theatre, Sledgehammer Theatre and Stone Soup Theatre share 10th Avenue Theatre. It is an adaptive and amenable space.
The spare production of “4.48 Psychosis” features movement and sound design by Ericka Aisha Moore, scenic design by Valerie Steele, lighting by Crystal Watts and costumes by Markee Rambo-Hood, who will be remembered as the Singer in Sledgehammer’s recent production of “Chiang Kai Chek.”