Tim rates it:
Artists who work in the medium of pain should, as a matter of safety, keep their personal and professional lives separate. One imagines Dante – whose work this piece recalls , in unexpected ways – drinking a good red and gnawing on a leg of mutton while mulling whether to have Judas hang from Satan’s nose, or from his beard, in the center of his Inferno. Dante was not a happy man, but he kept his infernal gaze firmly, and fiercely, pointed outward.
That was not Sarah Kane’s game. Theater, if it is to be worth a damn, is an exercise in truth-telling, and there is not a moment of 4.48 Psychosis which is not radiant with authenticity. The protagonist (Sara Barker) stands before us in the dark night of the soul, surrounded by an army of fellow sufferers who are, in fact, all her. In a vomitous pool of self-loathing, they pronounce their dread judgments like mantras: “I’m a failure.” “I’m fat.” “I can’t write.” “I’m ugly.” “No one loves me.” She stares at her sleeping lover at twelve minutes to five in the morning, envying the easy breathing, and contemplates her own suicide. It is as if someone has stripped off her skin, and she stands before us all nerve and muscle, bleeding out her life.
It is a tone poem to despair, the cry of someone who is deeply, clinically depressed, but it is also something common to all of us. After all, who among us has not confronted one or more of these demons? Who among us has not dragged himself out of bed at 4.48 a.m., and wondered at how short he has fallen from his dreams or expectations? But the healthy person concludes that this vitriol laden judgment, while it may be true, is irrelevant. I may be a schmuck, he thinks, but I am still a child of God.
That, alas, was also not Sarah Kane’s game. Shortly after writing 4.48 Psychosis, she surrendered her body. She was twenty-eight.
Kane left few instructions about staging 4.48 Psychosis. She even left the size of the misery chorus up to the producing company. (The first production, staged more than a year after her death, used three actors). Director John Moletress here makes the brilliant decision to stage the play with ten actors. They are black and white, young and mature, male and female, British and American, as was Sarah Kane, as are we all.
The protagonist knows the way out of her misery, but does not know how to get there. She has someone who shares her bed but she has no one who shares, or even understands, her pain. Her instinctive struggle to end her aloneness is the story which weaves its way through this chorus of despair.
The protagonist is in a hospital, being treated, with a spectacular lack of success, for depression. (Her commentary on these efforts is full of surprising, macabre humor). Among the medicos who poke and prod her like an animal and fill her with chemicals, one doctor (Lisa Hodsoll) shows her something approaching a tough, dry affection. The protagonist grasps it like a lifeline, and when it comes time to leave the hospital (they have concluded that a newly-admitted violent psychotic needs her bed more than she does) she reaches out to her doctor in the hope of finding a deeper, more personal connection. I could tell you what happens next but I think you already know.
Moletress stages the play with the assistance of three television screens. Amusingly, commercials for antidepressants flutter across the screen as the protagonist suffers from the side effects of the antidepressants she has been prescribed. There is a frighteningly ambiguous recurring image which periodically creeps across the screen: in an otherwise empty hospital corridor, a man dressed in black walks across the screen and disappears. He could be a doctor at the end of his shift, or a thief looking for psychotropic drugs, or the devil, collecting souls.
The entire cast of this production is superb, but I particularly like Daniel Kenner, Karin Rosnizeck and Theodore M. Snead, each of whom gives the protagonist’s agony a different sort of voice. As for Barker, who has already won significant praise for her ability to portray disturbed young women in The House of Yes and This Storm Is What We Call Progress), it seems as if she is channeling Kane. Eyes wide with apprehension, face half a sneer and half a rictus of terror, she is the personification of someone who knows herself too well, and the saving grace of love not at all.
For the sad and chilling conclusion, Moletress drops the lights and lets us watch it on television, which is now where we prefer to learn about life. I hate to sound like a dumbstruck fumblemouth, but brothers and sisters, this is an awesome play, awesomely done. I cannot recall the futile run from the desert of the self more convincingly portrayed.
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, famously, that hell is other people. No it isn’t.
4.48 Psychosisby Sarah Kane 
Directed by John Moletress
Produced by Factory 449
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
Congratulations on the succcess of 4.48 Psychosis! The technical harmony and synchronization of the director, actors and stage crew was brilliant! Most touching was the articulation of the text through the eyes of the actors. As visitors to DC, my husband and I purchased tickets to several of the shows in Fringe Festival and plan to recommend this concept to our arts and culture people here in Providence. The emotional impact of this play was deeply felt long after we left the show.
Bravo!
ADDED PERFORMANCE of “4.48 Psychosis” Friday night (7/17) at 12:30 am!
Capital Fringe has added an additional performance of the sold out Factory 449 production of “4.48 Psychosis,” a Best of Fringe pick by The Washington Post, Washington City Paper and DC Theatre Scene.
Only 60 tickets available and go on sale today (Wed. 7/15) at Noon.
Please spread the word to anyone who wasn’t able to get tickets during the sold out run.
Rick Hammerly, co-Artistic Director/producer
Factory 449: a theatre collective
Hooray to Factory 449 for putting this show on stage. If you haven’t read the “script,” check it out, and then you’ll have an even greater appreciation for how hard it is to mount a show like this.
We at Molotov truly appreciate this aesthetic. We won’t use this space to stump for our own Fringe show; still, we’re glad to have kindred spirits in this town.
I didn’t see this production, but had the good fortune to see the iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert do it in French at the Brooklyn Acedemy of Music a few years back. Interestingly, both the production and her interpretation were in every way the complete antithesis of the production Tim saw. Huppert, dressed in black, her dark hair tightly pinned back, was on the stage alone the entire time — and did not move more than a millimeter throughout the play’s (1-1/2 hour?) duration. An astonishing performance, especially for an actress whose screen performances can be almost histrionically vivid…
This production was amazing. Not only was the script uniquely interpreted, but the actors (10, according to my program) demonstrated the true meaning of ensemble work. The effect of the ensemble representing both the different aspects of this suicidal woman as well as “everyman,” was incredibly intense. The production itself was technically superior to most Fringe shows I have seen in the past and the film at the end of the production was devastating. Kudos to the cast and to those who created and brought such a stunning piece to this year’s Fringe.
I liked this show, but not as much as Tim. Parts of it were very touching and authentic, but other parts weren’t. I realize real depression might not be as theatrical, but depression is anger turned inward. Themes were touched but not developed (e.g., the bit on religion didn’t go anywhere, versus have the person mad at God for making her ill and/or ashamed because of what she’s planning). Overall, I don’t think that the fragments came together to form a compelling and cohesive mosaic. Nonetheless, I thought this ensemble cast did an excellent job and it is an interesting work.