4:48 Psychosis. St. Ann's Warehouse (see Off Broadway). By Sarah Kane. Directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna. With Magdalena Cielecka. Running time: 1hr 10mins. No intermission.
4:48 Psychosis: In brief
Poland's Grzegorz Jarzyna, of the world-renowned company TR Warszawa, adapts and directs Sarah Kane's searingly personal 1999 work about the time of morning when the suicidal mind grows most desperate. Magdalena Cielecka stars; performances are in Polish, with English supertitles.
4:48 Psychosis: Theater review by Helen Shaw
If you're a little disoriented by the arrival of a TR Warszawa 4:48 Psychosis at St. Ann's Warehouse, note that the production actually hails from 2002. That's why the aesthetic, soaked in blue neon light, recalls director Grzegorz Jarzyna's noir works from that period (like Risk Everything) and why the slick treatment itself feels rather dated.
Sarah Kane's final work (staged a year after her 1999 suicide) trembled on the edge of all the forbidden things, confessional, lyrical, mad. It's a confusion of unattributed voices and medical dosages, a poem that steeps us in the droning consciousness of the self-aware and self-harming.
Jarzyna has adapted it, which means he ripped out tons of text then assigned the remaining words mostly to a central figure (Magdalena Cielecka). The poetic, abstract grandeur drains away, and we're left with a highly illustrated series of rants, in which Cielecka plays a woman (a pseudo-Kane?) desperate to kill herself. She fights with a shrink, throws pills all over the floor and clings to a lover. Jarzyna basically just wants the language that lets her scream, so we lose the ascetic quality of the text, and we lose its debt to Beckett. We lose gorgeous lines like “a cyclical fear / that's not the moon it's the earth / a revolution.” Jarzyna instead has Cielecka repeat the words “love me,” again and again. That's...not a great substitution.
Twelve years ago, taking a difficult, dark play and “solving” it with a series of glossy, sumptuous design choices seemed daring—and Warszawa's cinematic, Greenaway-esque production has already had one triumphant world tour. Now, though, the very beauty of the stage images seems troubling. Malgorzata Szczesniak's set has the supersaturated colors and perfectly corroded textures of a Vogue spread; it includes a striking green ceramic wall with a row of sinks and a narrow, Plexiglas hallway that drags itself across the floor. Any single moment could be a shot for a coffee table book—everything is composed and exquisite.
Cielecka's performance, on the other hand, is full of shuddering and screaming; one monologue delivered with her head in her hands, another while she throws herself violently against a wall. Yet this too seems overaestheticized. She stands topless before us for one section, while Jarzyna sends a naked, 80-year-old “version” of herself (Jadwiga Turek) on a long walk around the slippery, darkened space. And yes, we see the (uncomplicated) metaphor, that the woman has stripped herself bare for us. But Cielecka's sleekness robs the moment of its power. I was reminded of the Public's production of Hair when all the actors were shaved, plucked, waxed and buffed. There is a gesture here at rawness without any of the messiness that might entail.
One of the many things cut in Jarzyna's adaptation is a refrain, though it's unclear from the text if it's a stage direction or something meant to be said. “Hatch opens / Stark light.” There's such incredible light in this production: deep jewel-blue fluorescents, a tightly focused honey-colored spot, the flickering incandescent that hangs above a far-upstage sink, a long crepuscular dimness. Designer Felice Ross and indeed the whole production can be proud of the extraordinary images they've made. But for this text, I believe starkness was required.—Theater review by Helen Shaw