Word: freuds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Darwin's discovery of evolution, Freud's of the unconscious, and the manipulation of conditioned reflexes by social and psychological "engineering," he believes, have all tended to reduce man to the status of object rather than subject. "Yet the most pertinent question-who controls psychological conditioning and social engineering-has not been answered except by the horrifying shadow of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. This question is the decisive one. It shows that there is at least one point in which subjectivity cannot be annihilated: namely in those who annihilate. Science cannot reduce into mere objects...
...Country is historically Freud's play, it is dramatically Elizabeth's story. An attractive, mercurial, at once cool and responsive woman, Elizabeth lost the use of her legs after the death of her father and then her sister, walks on crutches and awaits-or, as Freud suggests, looks forward to-a wheelchair. At first she is mockingly certain that he can find no cure where a shoal of specialists have failed. Then she warms to him until-sympathizing, badgering, cajoling, but endlessly probing her mind-he probes too far; for she, meanwhile-talking, laughing, sparring, flirting, recollecting-blurts...
However factually accurate or clinically Freudian the play may be, it has a general effect of truth, of document and drama going hand in hand. What is vital to it is the portrait of Freud-dedicated, balked, often brusque-who is ably acted by Steven Hill; what is crucial is the delineation of Elizabeth, acted with extraordinary suppleness and intelligence by Kim Stanley. Indeed, under Alfred Ryder's controlled direction and inside Donald Oenslager's evocative set, the production is everywhere helpful...
...weakness of A Far Country is a structural clash between Freud's play and Elizabeth's story. Part of the trouble is that where, in another kind of Miracle Worker, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan are glued inside one consuming relationship, things are quite different here. Elizabeth is but a person, a case history, in the career of a personage, a revolutionizer of history. But trouble lies also in the stage itself which, unlike a book, cannot bring everything into focus by having everything-including Elizabeth's story-seen through Freud's eyes. Hence not Freud...
...despite its broken impact, A Far Country proves an often vibrant blend, as against the usual clash, of theater and truth. Truth on Broadway is needed, and if Freud helps bring it there, perhaps more Freud would help Broadway, too, out of spending so much of its life on crutches...