A Play by Lukas Bärfuss, Starring Grace Gummer, Opens at the Wild Project (original) (raw)

Theater Reviews|Sex Without the Shame, but Not Without the Consequences

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/theater/reviews/14neur.html

Theater Review | 'The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents'

Sex Without the Shame, but Not Without the Consequences

The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents

Nov. 13, 2008

“The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents,” by the Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss, is part case study, part dark comedy of manners. With that title and a teenage heroine named Dora, the play conjures Freud only to turn him on his head. (Can that cigar stay lit upside down?)

Dora (Grace Gummer) has been medicated for years for an unidentified problem. When taken off drugs, she experiences an erotic awakening that comes without corresponding hang-ups. She just wants to have sex she puts it more bluntly and does so, with a “fine gentleman” (Max Lodge) who comes in search of gooseberries (really) to the produce stand where Dora works.

Freud’s Dora was the subject of his turn-of-the-last-century study “An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” Mr. Bärfuss’s modern Dora isn’t a hysteric: free of shame, she’s an innocent, whose “lack of restraint,” as her mother calls it, leads to pregnancy, a coerced abortion, a beating.

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Peter O’Connor and Grace Gummer in “The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents” by Lukas Bärfuss at the Wild Project.Credit...Thomas Hand Keefe

Dora’s incomprehension of sexual mores throws into high relief the hypocrisy of those around her, including her doctor (a hard-working Peter O’Connor), who gets hot and bothered lecturing her about carnal matters. Secrecy about the topic baffles her. When she spies her mother (Laura Heidinger) enjoying sex she says, “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.” Mother: “Be quiet.”

Translated by Neil Blackadder, “Sexual Neuroses,” an Electric Pear production directed by Kristjan Thor, is a serious, thematically layered work that should be more interesting than it is. The material too often seems tame and lifeless, a series of provocative propositions about health and illness rather than a full-blooded drama.

In her New York theatrical debut, Ms. Gummer, a daughter of Meryl Streep, does her best to make Mr. Bärfuss’s ideas seem like more than just ideas. When Dora parrots the phrases of others, their words sound platitudinous or silly, and Ms. Gummer, who knows how to get a laugh, adds something extra: a caustic, knowing edge.

Ms. Gummer seems to have inherited her mother’s acting smarts. This is an impressively thought-through performance that retains the power to surprise in a play that mostly doesn’t.

“The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents” continues through Nov. 22 at the Wild Project, 195 East Third Street, East Village; (212) 352-3101, electricpear.org.

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