When husbands cheat and wives take revenge – playwrights take notice. In contemporary San Francisco same as in ancient Athens, medieval Venice, or fin-de-siècle Vienna there is hardly a more titillating topic for a stage production than that of love and its infinite capacity for betrayal and manipulation.
For its Second Annual Celebration of Women’s History Month Festival, 3Girls Theatre revived Lynne Kaufman’s The Couch – a hilarious onstage analysis of the fathers of psychoanalysis and the way they handle their own emotional challenges.
What would a wife of a genius do when her position of his muse passes to his fresh-faced and youthfully-passionate patient? How would a doctor treat his own banal dilemma of loving two women and not being able to remain a respectable professional because of that? How his admired mentor would suggest resolving the problem mostly inspired by his own authoritative theory?
The very names of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud as characters in a play are destined to raise interest in the San Francisco’s sophisticated spectatorship. Thankfully, Lynne Kaufman’s hilariously witty writing is as fresh as ever, and the deliverance by a quintet of stellar performers never disappoints.
The play first premiered in 1985, winning the Will Glickman Award for Best New Play, the L.A. Drama-Logue Award for Best Writing, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Best New Play.
Directed by Amy Glazer, The Couch features Peter Ruocco as Carl Jung, Maggie Mason as Toni Wolfe, Louis Parnell as Sigmund Freud, Courtney Walsh as Emma Jung, and Hattie Rose Allen Bellino as Katherine Jung.
The Couch runs through March 31 at Tides Theatre (Formerly SF Playhouse) at 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Box office: 415-275-0348.
More information at: www.3girlstheatre.org
Image: courtesy 3 Girls Theatre.
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