Review: 4.48 Psychosis, with Backyard Theatre Company

content warning: discussion of suicide, suicidal ideation, violence, and mental illness.

every few years here in Chicago, an up-and-coming storefront company full of eager artists looking to push theatrical boundaries and prove their avant-garde bona fides will go ahead and produce a work by the late, great, in-yer-face playwright, Sarah Kane. and when I say "they will produce a work," I mean to say "they will produce 4.48 Psychosis."
i'm not even being hyperbolic here; as far as my scouring of the internet has shown me, none of Kane's four other published plays (Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, and Crave) have been produced in Chicago in the last decade. 4.48 Psychosis has been produced thrice, with the latest staging now bursting onto the scene from Backyard Theatre Company in performance at the Bramble Arts Loft in Andersonville.

the frequent draw towards Kane's final play - a poetic cry into the abyss that wouldn't be professionally staged until after Kane's tragic death by suicide - isn't too hard to reason out. over the course of her far-too-brief career in the 1990s, Kane's work grew far more abstract and impressionistic; the specificity of character, location, and action (particularly action of a violent nature) seen in the depraved soldiers of Blasted, the incestuous Greeks of Phaedra's Love, and the repressed inmates of the horrific "university" in Cleansed were all but stripped away for Crave, her penultimate work, with characters solely denoted by letters of the alphabet and little else. this loose dramatic underpinning would further unravel in 4.48 Psychosis, a play with no specified characters or locations of any sort, and no stage directions outside of select silences. if one wanted to get truly morbid, certain fragments of 4.48 Psychosis read more like a lyrical suicide note than a piece of dramatic writing, altogether a gorgeously literary, if frantic and abrasive, reckoning with a young artist's mind and body.

so it goes, directors and performers looking to honor the work of Sarah Kane without having to wade through the thorny mess of bigoted language, ultra violence, and sexual abuse inherent in her other work can do so with 4.48 Psychosis, a work that, more than most other plays out there, relies on its creative team to act as "co-author" of the production. the nature of the text allows for wide variation from production to production, from the ability to cast any number of performers (from one sole performer to a whole ensemble), to the chance to design the space however one see fits, all to the point where one could argue that a production of 4.48 Psychosis tells us more about its director than it does about Sarah Kane.

here, director Hannah Ottenfeld and their team have chosen something of a literalization of Kane's actively non-literal text, a means of grappling with the piece by pinning it down and hoisting narrative upon it. it's certainly a valid means of interpreting Kane's work, finding something of a balance between its more fluid stream-of-consciousness lyricism and the through-line of an individual struggling with suicidal ideation. Ottenfeld and co. create two clear-cut characters to follow; an unnamed "protagonist" (Amelia Tam) suffering from depressive thoughts that could be read as an analogue for Kane, and a kind-eyed psychiatrist (a wonderfully empathetic Cee Patricia Scallen) attempting to support our protagonist through their crisis. the other three performers (Erin Donohue, Francesca Zaccor, and Audrey Smith-Phillips), adorned in imitation loose-fitting knitted garb designed by costume designer Emma Brandenburger, live onstage as physical extensions of the mind of Tam's character, providing a space for the more introspective, outre aspects of the text to move through the staging.

Ottenfeld's team of talented theatermakers are undeniable in their craft and ingenuity, Annie Grey Smith's plastic scenic design cleverly playing off the final line of the script and providing a daring, almost-claustrophobic feel for the room, and Jae Robinson's sound design adds some particularly jarring and discordant energy throughout (though its continued presence for the majority of the evening does threatens to create a one-note sonic atmosphere for us to sit in).

one does pine for a staging that leans more towards the experimental than what's on display here - for one example, sequences in the text that are simply composed of a series of numbers are transliterated here into a sort of psychological number-sequencing test for Tam - but it's no small feat to take a text as unruly as Kane's and mash it into the nobly-performed, fairly legible shape it holds here, and Ottenfeld's gambit of trading in poetic abstraction for dramatic clarity works more often than not. Ottenfeld's vision is undeniably held together by the stellar quintet of performers in play, none moreso than Tam, her physical and vocal prowess tackling Kane's text with ease, her commitment to the tragedy and grief of her character acting as a superb anchor for the ensemble around her.

it's not an easy thing to produce 4.48 Psychosis; it sits alongside films like CIAO! MANHATTAN and BLUE, and albums like David Bowie's "Blackstar" as a meaningful and terrifying artistic will and testament. but as long as you're willing to approach the work with care, intention, and a shared collaborative spirit, you're bound to create something of worth. for a play that our city's young artists can't seem to get enough of, Backyard Theatre Company's 4.48 Psychosis, in its own singular way, reminds us why that's the case.

4.48 Psychosis runs an estimated 90 minutes, and performs at the Bramble Arts Loft (5545 N Clark) through April 12th 2026. Tickets are available HERE.