A Devouring Darkness Finally Cinches Its Grip
‘4:48 Psychosis,’ a Polish Adaptation of Sarah Kane’s Play
Ben Brantley
October 20, 2014: The basic strategy is as simple as it is devastating: Go ahead, open up that sealed room; let some light into the darkness. Then watch helplessly as the darkness devours the light. That’s the operating theory behind the TR Warszawa company’s stunning reinvention of 4:48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane’s sustained suicide note of a play, which opened on Sunday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. As adapted and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, this Polish-language (and language-transcending) production ropes its audience into unconditional engagement with a baleful, private spectacle of self-destruction. “See me,” says its unnamed heroine, fully and unflinchingly embodied by the brilliant Magdalena Cielecka. “Touch me.” The words are a taunt, since she is so far beyond our reach. The final work from Kane, a prodigiously gifted British dramatist who hanged herself in 1999 at the age of 28, 4:48 Psychosis would have seemed to be all but unstageable. It is written in fragments, in phrases of disgust and despair and recrimination, annotated with specific dosage numbers for prescription drugs used to treat depression.
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