You are in my study, not some boulevard farce! protests the Father Of Modern Psychology, but nowadays, the mere mention of Sigmund Freud's name constitutes a joke, and so a certain vaudeville atmosphere is unavoidable.
Terry Johnson is savvy enough to play into rather than against it in Hysteria, a speculative account of Freud's final years. He resided in London, where he was safe from Nazi persecution but riddled with pain from terminal cancer. Specifically, Hysteria recounts an evening when his subject's solitary retirement is interrupted by two visitors: the daughter of his most famous patient, and the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. The latter comes to praise Freud for his mapping of the mind, and the former, to upbraid him for bending his principles to social pressures. In a madcap hallucination exacerbated by his medicinal morphine, Freud's accuser's passionate call for justice is constantly interrupted by motifs straight out of French comedy -- scantily-clad females in closets, trouserless men passed out on floors, hastily-improvised alibis, slamming doors -- until finally the entire room goes surreal, granting its occupant his absolving peripeteia -- for the moment.
Yasen Peyankov, rapidly accumulating recognition as one of Chicago's fastest-rising talents, exhibits his characteristic dry wit and unflappable dignity in portraying the weary Freud, while Mariann Mayberry endows the antagonistic Jessica with virginal tenacity. Acting as their foils are Marc Vann as a factotum-functioning Dali and Nicholas Rudall in the raisonneur-role of Dr.Yahuda. The question of whether Freud abandoned a legion of victims to the mercies of incestuous child-molesters may appear an unlikely theme for a comedy, but John Malkovich -- no stranger himself to slight-of-brain tricks -- directs a briskly-paced rendition of Johnson's cerebrally-dense puzzle that keeps us entertained even as we struggle, as Freud struggled, to evaluate his complicity in the destruction of innocents.
