PAWTUCKET, R.I. - “Boy, that was fun,’’ a man deadpanned as the audience rose from its seats to leave the Gamm Theatre after watching - or should that be surviving? - “4:48 Psychosis.’’
His need to find release in humor was understandable, and, to judge by the ripple of laughter that greeted his remark, widely shared. For 72 minutes, we had all been locked inside the agony of another human being - a primal scream of a play that was almost unbearable at times.
But we also knew we had just witnessed a performance of astonishing intensity by Casey Seymour Kim as the unnamed Woman who sees no reason to go on living.
This is full-immersion acting at its finest. Kim so thoroughly inhabits the central character in Sarah Kane’s autobiographical work that she does not seem to be performing at all. (When the actress bounces onstage with a sunny smile to take her bows at play’s end, the effect is dislocating. Who is that?) Thanks to her and to director Tony Estrella, the Gamm’s “4:48 Psychosis’’ may be the most authentic representation of mental illness I’ve ever seen. It makes “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’’ look like “The Sound of Music.’’
Clinical depression goes by many names to its sufferers. Winston Churchill called it the “black dog.’’ William Styron, borrowing a phrase from Milton, titled his depression memoir “Darkness Visible.’’ Sylvia Plath came up with a distinctive metaphor for living with the condition in the title of her autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar.’’
To Sarah Kane, a British playwright who committed suicide in 1999 at the age of 28 and never saw this play staged, it was, simply, “hell.’’ It is revealing of how deeply she lived in that hell that the title of Kane’s final work gives the label “Psychosis’’ to the brief, pre-dawn period “when sanity visits’’ and the Woman enjoys a respite from despair.
It should be said that there are some stretches of bad writing in “4:48 Psychosis,’’ wince-inducing lines like “love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears,’’ when Kane was clearly straining to poeticize her suffering. There are some - very few - moments of mordant wit, as when the Woman confides that: “I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide.’’