PW gets Oedipal with student playwrights’ hilarious ‘Freud’

“I’ve been swayed to not really believe his ideas,” says Eli Batalion ’02 of Sigmund Freud, “but I really like the character.” 

Everything You Wanted to Know About Yourself But Were Afraid to Ask Freud, a play written and directed by Batalion and Jerome Saibil ’02 and running at the Production Workshop through Monday, takes this rather harmless statement to a zany, often terribly funny extreme. 
 
Part celebration, part lampoon of the omnipresent Viennese psychoanalyst, this crisply directed comedy could easily have resembled a bad episode of “Saturday Night Live” or a stupid stand-up routine. Indeed, at moments it skates on the thin ice of scatological jokes — admittedly, they’re quickly reined in — and a recurring angry audience member gag. 

But the writing in this developed script has been skillfully woven together, taking this play to places stand-up routine could never go. Batalion and Saibil have described their affinity for the punchy, surreal artistry of fringe theater, as well as the constant refinements their script underwent over a period of many months. This shows. 

Nevertheless, in Saibil’s words, “there might have been a little liquor involved” in his creative process, and despite a carefully constructed frame, this play has many moments of quick and surprising humor that burst out. 

Take, for example, an encounter between a student and “Professor Vatslob,” which causes the student endless angst, or Joseph apathetically analyzing Pharaoh — an ancient Freudian precedent. 

Pseudo-scholars at a podium narrate the show’s wacky vignettes. They expound Freud’s theories in six lessons (you might even learn a thing or two from the play) and introduce characters like Frankie, a lounge singer who gets analyzed by a bewigged colleague (“I’m so complexed!” he croons), and the young geography students who giggle at their teacher’s references to Peru’s Lake Titicaca. Some moments, of course, work better than others — but generating the sheer number of laughs that this show does is an impressive feat. 

The 60-mile-an-hour, technically masterful opening is fully sung through, Andrew Lloyd Webber style. We see Freud’s parents and baby Sigmund promptly dropped out from under his mother’s dress. Freud meets Jung and Freud loses Jung in a one-two series of melodramatic gestures. Freud discovers cocaine, and the lights and cast members briefly explode in unison. Nazis spin onstage and off again, Victorian doctors pop out of three doors to reject the Austrian, then Freud dies. 

Anne Martin ’04, stage manager and technical director, deserves much credit for pulling off this sequence. And the set (by Laura Jellinek ’04), lights (by Jarrod Fischer ’02) and costumes and props (by Whitney Brim-Deforest ’04) rival the polish of the writing. The 12-member cast simply works too well together to single any one member out; the cast members have the chemistry of the best comedy ensembles. 

At the end of “Freud” there actually is a stand-up comic, who lumbers onstage and delivers the cheap, trashy jokes that had been missing from the script. This ironic touch caps perfectly the well-crafted antics of this play.

And surprisingly enough, his jokes are funny. 

— Brian Healy