At the supermarket, a man lingers over the label of a tuna can that he was reading. She is bothered. She is in a hurry. She thinks of asking him politely to stand aside. She is angry and before having time to find her words, she hits him with the can on the head, fast and efficiently. Afterwards, she wants to be forgiven for her reckless behaviour by surrounding herself with art, but tough luck, the cab driver goes in the opposite direction from where the museum is. Scandal! The cab driver kicks her out of the car.
No matter how hard they would try to control themselves, the reality outruns the two vulnerable characters from Nervous Laughter, by Cristopher Durang, directed by Szabo. K. Istvan form The Youths’ Theatre in Piatra Neamț and interpreted by Isabela Neamțu and Cezar Antal. The existence destroys their protection walls of happiness and of calmness and gradually takes them back to the initial paranoia. However, they don’t give in, they go to therapy, to courses, and they practice meditation: they breathe in and out! He holds tightly with his nails the filled half of the glass. Intelligently, the director chooses minimal solutions. A Chinese drop, evidently, trickles down pic- pic, non-stop, but the glass gets empty inevitably- both literally and figuratively. The boy, which clings with his teeth to the optimism emanated by the psychotherapy meetings, gulps down the glass, but he doesn’t do it to his happiness!
Minute after minute, the two are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Szabo. K. Istvan builds two clear-cut histrionic discourses starting with these premises. His characters are pushed around by the reality that disrupts any mirroring. The more they analyse themselves the further they get form the decent measure of truth. They remain completely unaligned, they can’t grasp the rules, while the reality plan and the individual plan are completely unsynchronized- they simply don’t fuse. The small things bother them to profound nagging. This has as a result disorientation and evidently much unhappiness, agitation, guilt, and nervous laughter, which leads to the flattening of the terms of reference. Thus, who could say what is more important: the sun that is rising or the missing tooth of the neighbour from the therapy. Empathy or antipathy? Confusion, consfusion, consfusion, and just one viable solution: breathe in – breathe out!
Planted within the anxious world of our days, the advice with valence of Hindu philosophy, is transformed into a mechanic exercise devoid of sense. It is just a purely scientific definition of life, which has as a result emptiness and afterwards, neurosis. The effort of the two, of knowing themselves, of analysing themselves, of transforming themselves and to finding a meaning, fails on a regular basis. They fight by the book through an endless analysis, while trying to correct themselves and to feed their hope. However, the great truth is trivial “breathe!” The pressure of the daily annoying inessentials increases the inadequacy. Thrown into an aimless world, the human has no chance of creating it through himself, nor to create its boundary marker no matter how many therapeutic miracles he would try.
The performance begins with a space of self- judgement in which the two characters stay in a metro station waiting to have their turn in the receiving room- that is to say in front of the public. Apparently, the discourse is coherent, however at a certain point the hiatus occurs. The text is comical each time, precisely through this humorous incidents and amusing syncope. The actors glide towards comic with a discretion worthy of jealousy. Isabela Neamțu, in what might be considered as her most nuanced part, embodies the hopeless woman that is overwhelmed by the insignificances, which gradually glide towards paranoia and violence. The passages form the hysteria governed by the interior laughter, to the strong woman and than to the confusion without seeing the end of the interior labyrinth, is gradually done. Cezar Antal, with a special endowment towards the comic, builds his humorous and light-headed characters with all the attributes of the entertainment.
Each of the two has a serious problem with interconnections. Slightly crazy, they both try to decipherer their own narrow interior destiny that is all the more infernal as it is constantly changing. From the small incidents provoked by the exterior world, the performance gradually descend into the abyss of interior chaos. Is it real or is it a dream? Is it her dream or his? The two distinct projections intersect. Does each one of them react to the dream of the other? There is nothing new in these questions that are suitable for the 16th century. What is new is Cristopher Durang’s architecture that mixes the questions, while choosing to contemplate on the confusion created by the idols of our days: television and religion. Where there are no landmarks, plans- inevitably equal- have the same place in the hierarchy. With their aberrant solutions (sex is made only for procreation, says baby Jesus from Prague, while Oprah is capable of solving the hardest problems of human kind in 30 minutes), the idols and the inadequacy, which is felt in respect to any difficulties, arise aversion.
Very well directed and very well acted, Nervous Laughter is like a theatrical jazz on pre-established themes and emotions, those of our days. It is worth seeing!
