What Do They Want?

WHEN THE PSYCHOANALYSTS need more support than their patients, the situation is beyond therapy. Or Beyond Therapy, if you're a playwright named Christopher Durang. If you don't want to blame the nuttiness of his comical concoction on the three years he spent in Dunster House, you can certainly pin it on grad school at Yale. That leaves open, however, the question of the play's underlying seriousness. For Beyond Therapy isn't just a comedy, though it seems like it should be. Through the words of his character Mrs. Wallace, Durang diagnoses his own problem in this play: he "needs to know what he wants."

Durang's characters have their own problems, from perfection-seeking to premature ejaculation. Bruce and Prudence, a wavering bisexual and the tense People reporter who answers his personals ad, share in the problems--especially with each other. "I hope I'm not too macho for you," says Bruce at their first meeting. Let's be frank: that's not the problem for Prudence. "It's just that I hate gay people," he says.

The scenes alternate between rendezvous and therapy session, introducing the audience to Prudence's doctor, Stuart Framingham. Oversexed, insecure and aspiring towards machismo, his only valid diagnosis is the one-liner. "You need to accept imperfection, and I can help you with that." Bruce's doctor, Mrs. Wallace, displays her wackiness through her wild word searches--"derigible...no, I mean secretary!"--which are over-written, though not overplayed. If you want a stuffed Snoopy to bark support for your ability to express your emotions, she's the shrink for you. She helps Bob, Bruce's lover, when he is suicidally upset with Bruce for seeing a woman (Prudence); she helps them all in the end, if they can be helped, with her "I'm OK, you're OK" philosophy. Mrs. Wallace is wacky but hers isn't the real problem. The problem is that Beyond Therapy is too funny to be serious, and too serious to be funny.

THIS PARADOX stems from a strong point of the production: the acting. In one case at least, it may be just too good. The farcical psychoanalyst--Mrs. Wallace and, to a point, Dr. Stuart Framingham--are played to the hilt by Ruth Bolotin and Adam Barr. Daniel Hurewitz is hilarious as Bob, who sulks, shuts his ears to reason and sings Frere Jacques. Caroline Bicks is a strong, though somewhat monotonous, Prudence, who does not know if she wants a husband, but certainly does not think she wants a crazy one. The candidate for both those spots is Bruce, played with sensitivity and conviction by Damian Bagdan.

He is funny, too--as funny as the best of them. But his portrayal of a bisexual who wants a wife and children, plus a dash of stability and some unburned Rice-a-Roni is too convincing, too close to touching, to quite fit into this farce of modern existence.

Which raises the question whether Beyond Therapy is just a not always lighthearted attack on the modern self indulgences of uncertain sexuality, crazier-than-thou psychoanalysts and Perrier water. Even if they are old hat, the problems of loneliness and confusion with which the play deals are real to most and too realistically explored to fit in with the farce of this all.

Prudence's "No, you're not rejecting me, buddy. I'm rejecting you," is as serious as rejection can get. Either less fun or less seriousness would make this play fit better into the audience's categorical perceptions about comedy and chaos. Then again, the fault may be intentional: perhaps the border between the two is what Durang meant to explore.

If not, the fault is Damian Bagdan's for sounding too sincere. He's sincere enough to convince a Real-Man seeker, a traditional girl, a Prudence; to marry him, unless it's the speed and confusion of events which carry her to the submission point. These, plus the sharply-directed timing, carry the audience along with her through this production of Beyond Therapy. Yes, the set changes are distractingly clumsy, and the flatly acted waiter who finally shows up in the last scene is a detraction. With these problems, though, this is a play worth seeing, if only to laugh out loud and be reminded that most people like Prudence, Bob, Bruce and Durang, wavering between farce and drama, don't know what they want.