OnStage Pittsburgh
Nov 6, 2024
The cast presents the final torment of Sarah Kane with heart, compassion and spectacle. Our intention is to celebrate life while honoring the gifts left to us by those who have gone before.
Vigilance Theater Group‘s next journey into unchartered theatrical territory will be an immersive retelling of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, completed not long before the English playwright took her own life in 1999, at age 28.
In his review of the 2004 Royal Court Theatre production of 4.48 Psychosis, then New York
Times critic Ben Brantley called it a “breathtakingly beautiful and ugly suicide note of a play,” under the headline, “Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Relentless Pain.”
“4.48 Psychosis is an unvarnished presentation of a person succumbing to their inner demons,” said director Harper York. “The immersive nature of our production delivers three different interpretations on what that might be like for each of us. The cast presents the final torment of Sarah Kane with heart, compassion and spectacle. Our intention is to celebrate life while honoring the gifts left to us by those who have gone before.”
At a site revealed upon purchase of tickets, audience members will be guided through “a nonlinear and disjointed tale of loss, turmoil, and uncertainty.”
The “4.48” of the title refers to the early morning hours when “depression visits. … After 4.48 / I shall not speak again.”
The Vigilance website provides a link to Kane’s full script, and a list of its potential trigger warnings: suicide, anxiety, depression, medical trauma, self harm, gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia.
The cast consists of Bradleigh Bell, Allie Lampman-Sims, Ivy Mackinson, Marisa Postava, Anne Rematt and Abbie Siecinski.
Earlier this year, Pittsburgh’s Elsewhere Theatre Company produced the Kane play Crave, which includes disturbing topics such as incest, addiction and murder, and also follows Kane’s distinctive nonlinear, poetic structure. Kane’s only work produced for the screen is the award-winning short film Skin, which confronts racism with an encounter between a violent skinhead and an attack on a Black wedding party.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Vigilance Theater Group’s immersive production of 4.48 Psychosis runs November 14-24, 2024. Tickets: visit https://events.humanitix.com/4-48-psychosis-vigilance. The production is intended for audiences aged 16 and up.