 
NEURASTHENIA B. Iden Payne Theatre, Austin Directed by Rachel Perlmeter Designed by Anna B. Labykina Music by Michael Kranes Spring 2001 NEURASTHENIA (A Comedy): in which seven nervous travelers converge in a fantastic place called Spa-- a destination for the exhausted, the over-wrought, and all those seeking a healthy dose of the rest cure. The antics involve one Machiavellian, one brooding Jewess, a Russian princess/ somnambulist, a poet, and three melancholic Parisians newly liberated from the celebrated madhouse: La Salpêtrière. Can your mental faculties keep up with the pace and pressures of modern life in the city? … You must relax.  ********************* Apocryphal Dramaturgy This play concerns the venerable Parisian madhouse, La Salpêtrière, where Jean Michel Charcot (1825-1893) held his famous Tuesday lectures on neurosis and hysteria. It has been dreamed up and pilfered from a historical record that twists and turns. Perhaps Charcot really did devote himself to studying the nervous maladies, naming each with care, quieting fears of uterine wandering, and prompting endless discussions on the nature of malfunctioning ovaries relaying unpleasant ideas to the mind. Maybe Dr. Axel Munthe really was his student, one who resisted the careerist mentality of the highbrow Parisian doctors who filled the hall for Charcot’s demonstrations. If they were real, imagine then, what it might be like to travel to Paris and find this place (which persists, it goes on) where they tried to know madness. In the wards, nuns come and go- but mainly doctors. Try to hallucinate Spa-- not the one in Belgium, where the waters taste of barium and radioactive strontium-- any Spa. It might be a place by the sea where you could try to stop, or maybe it has all the trappings. If we abandoned the lesions and the manias, the capricious subconscious desires, the pills, the placebos and the absinthe… then what? Madwomen are suspicious but its only natural- they’re more emotional than men with smaller brains and muscles… Beware the flying neuralgias, the vaginismus, and above all the uterine wanderings… If the English were phlegmatic, the Germans plethoric, then the Americans were nervous… Nothing like ritalin for the child with an overactive imagination… Avoid les femmes with their little lists of ailments to recount… No chocolates for the migraine sufferer…. Art is typically pathological behavior directed into different media, or else it’s the vapours… Misdirected convalescents sometimes amuse themselves by masquerading as lunatics… Watch out for hypochondriacal disorders-- the cure is generally endless my dear; for the Patients are so delighted, not only with a Variety of Medicines, but also of physicians…. Caution, just as the actor hypnotizes his wide-awake public, so does the painter persuade the viewer that he sees a landscape where there is nothing….Are you calming down yet?… Relax faster.  |
