THE MAKING OF FREUD
Theater Oobleck at Chicago Filmmakers
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As David Futrelle pointed out in these pages a couple of weeks ago, Freud is under intense attack these days, particularly for his insensitivity to women. But you don’t have to unquestioningly admire someone of Freud’s significance to appreciate him–nor do you have to reject everything he represents if you criticize his shortcomings. David Isaacson’s The Making of Freud and Sharon Evans’s Freud, Dora and the Wolfman neither bash nor beatify their protagonist: they recognize his profound impact on modern Western thought, for better and worse, and offer remarkably balanced yet highly individual responses. Neither playwright seeks to be objective (or even historically accurate); each uses Freud as a touchstone for his or her own concerns.
Though different in tone–Evans’s play is delicate and whimsical, Isaacson’s brash and rough-edged–both works deliberately blur fantasy and reality, hardly surprising considering the importance of dream symbolism in Freud’s analytical method. Both are marked by expansive inquiry; rather than dumbing down their characters, the shows challenge their subjects and their viewers, venturing into intriguing new areas suggested by odd juxtapositions of history and fiction. Yet these are not ponderous productions but amusing, exhilarating celebrations of theater at its most playful and intelligent.
What movie clips do for The Making of Freud puppets accomplish in Freud, Dora and the Wolfman. Inspired by two of Freud’s most famous patients–a teenage girl he called “Dora” in the monograph he wrote about her, and Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat known as the Wolfman–this musical-theater piece depicts inner and outer experience by having the principal actors interact with child-size alter egos. Make that alter ids. These ingenious rod puppets (designed by John Gegenhuber and Cynthia Orthal and sensitively manipulated and voiced by puppeteers Jamie Vann, Gabriella Santinelli, and Julie Ann Daley) speak to their grown-up flesh-and-blood counterparts, and at some points replace them, to dramatize the ongoing dialogue we all have with our inner self.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Roger Lewin-Jennifer Girard Photo, Karen A. Peters.
