Word: psychopathia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once Wallace gets our gawking attention, his deviants become like the Krafft-Ebing case histories in Psychopathia Sexualis, grotesque illustrations of fundamental errors in personal relations. To what point? Wallace suggests coyly that Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload. Sometimes this works; when it doesn't, we get a facetious exercise like the "pop quizzes" in Octet that pose dire situations mimicking academic test questions...
...Psychopathia Sexualis, the latest off-Broadway effort from John Patrick Shanley (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone), is, unfortunately, a model of what playwrights should avoid. It's a slim but labored farce about a young man (Andrew McCarthy) who can't make love without having his father's socks around and the psychiatrist (Edward Herrmann) who has taken them away. The stale shrink jokes wouldn't pass muster on an average episode of Seinfeld, not to mention Shanley's own better work, like his flavorful screenplay for Moonstruck. What Hollywood gave Shanley was discipline...