“Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thing, stuffed, prop up in the air. He is way down. He is sinking. His house is a dead thing that weights him down.”
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February 2021
Adrienne Kennedy's Sleep Deprivation Chamber
The Round House Theatre’s Adrienne Kennedy festival, with online videos of four plays was a gift. She fuses elegance and fury. Words, images, identities are put into play. Personal history isn’t the focus, but one of the elements. The process of writing is another. She embraces messiness and loose ends and the endlessness of obsessions.
“Sleep deprivation chamber” stands out: no props, no slides, no symbolic images. “Just” words: Suzanne’s letters pleading for help, the insane theater of cross-examinations, depositions, Mom’s voice on the telephone, …. Above all, Suzanne’s insisting on the uprightness and respectability of Teddy and their whole family. They are law-abiding, moral, industrious, successful, educated, public-spirited, …. The crux of the drama is the discovery that none of that matters.
Cuts and blackouts, repetition, starting over and over, commenting on the story, … it’s not anti-realism but a higher, realer realism.It was a shame not to experience it embodied and in person, but even as a stream it hits its mark.