Review: Woman in Mind | ICT Mainstage | Irving Arts Center

Irving — It's happened a million times. Someone drops a smart phone or laptop on hard concrete, and though it still works something just isn't the same.

Now, imagine a computer many times more powerful and, at the same time, fragile. So fragile it's protected by an extremely dense series of plates. Yes, the human brain. Imagine if that was "dropped." What could happen?

That's exactly the notion noted playwright Alan Ayckbourn explores in Woman in Mind, playing at Irving's ICT Mainstage.

The play opens immediately after Susan (Dana Harrison) has apparently returned from cartoon land because she has knocked herself out by stepping on a rake and bopping herself in the head with the upward swinging handle. It's at least played off as embarrassing, but really, of all the ways someone could render themselves unconscious…

Quickly it becomes obvious that this was no ordinary bump on the head as Susan begins to hallucinate. Ayckbourn cleverly introduces this plot point and the audience is helped along by set designer Andy Redmon and lighting designer Bridget Doan who combine powers to create a definitive aural transition between the two worlds.

From there, Susan slowly devolves into a crumbled mess of a woman which presents a problem for the audience and the play itself. For once Susan's sanity has been called into question, what conclusive assumptions can be made about the other characters? What can be believed? Her husband in real life (Neil Rogers) and her delusionary husband (Charles Maxham) are both inconsistent characters. Either can be kind hearted or vile. In general, Maxham's Andy is portrayed as much happier and carefree and Rogers' Gerald is a dry, restrained pastoral type. But both flirt with a dark side and feign happiness at times.

In fact, Susan's imaginary family is oddly written all around, taking a decidedly bipolar turn at one point. And while some of this could be dismissed as Susan's loosening grasp on her sanity, it makes for a tough distinction between protagonists and antagonists.

Complicating matters is Ayckbourn's first-ever entrance into a first person story, which he strictly adheres to. However, seeing things only from Susan's perspective, especially given her unstable mental state, clouds the other characters and really prevents ample development.

For their part, the cast does an admirable job. It's a difficult script and some of the 180 degree turns these characters have to take are challenging. Susan's doctor, Bill (David Smith) gets perhaps the most even handed treatment in the script, and Smith aptly sails that ship through the choppy waters of the muddled characterization of the other roles. Susan's hallucinatory family, especially her brother Tony (Scottie Corley) and daughter Lucy (Stephanie Fischer) strike an eerie chord between the paper doll projection of perfection and the haunting turn they eventually take. It's creepy.

However, this show really is all about Susan and it can only go so far as Harrison's performance. In a challenging role, Harrison is up to the task for most of it. The climax of the show is itself anti-climactic save for the absolute final note. And that's not Harrison's fault. But for a woman trying to hold on to the cliff of sanity over a bottomless pit of madness, Ayckbourn sometimes loses here in tedious mundaneness. Though she is somehow cosmically tied to the setting of the garden, the fact that she is not more serious about what's happening to her is odd at times. Ultimately though, Harrison effectively exudes the agitation and pure mania of someone getting lost in her own head. It's sometimes absurd, but downright disturbing at others.

Holding this whole crazy show together is J. Alan Hanna. And though the supporting cast would have benefitted from clearer character direction, ultimately all the moving parts came together and the end effect, one of discomfort, felt intentional.

Woman in Mind is far from perfect and not your typical Ayckbourn. It may suffer somewhat from the suspicion that the story is an autobiographical recounting of his own mother's nervous breakdown, or it may just be that the subject was so difficult; this is the best that could be expected. But, what does work, intentional or not, is that it leaves a cold feeling, an uneasiness about things that make it difficult to reflect upon without the feeling coming back.

Perhaps it's the brain shuddering at the thought of facing its own fragility and mortality.