A Wonderful “World of Dissocia”

“Life’s full of clatter, but none of it matters,” the smooth voice of Joshuah B. Campbell ’16 rang out in a haunting recording about halfway through the first act of “The Wonderful World of Dissocia.” On stage, puppet master Alona R. Bach ’16, dressed in angelic white and wearing her hair in youthful pigtails, cradled and maneuvered a polar bear as the voiceover song continued, “Only who’ll hold your paw when you die?”

This moment of paradoxical comfort for protagonist Lisa Jones (Chloe A. Brooks ’19, an active Crimson Arts editor) exemplified the poignant tension and tenderness that characterized the entire production, which ran from April 22 to 30 on the American Repertory Theater’s mainstage. From the moment the stark spotlight hit Brooks in the play’s opening scene, it never left. Taken together, Brooks’s powerhouse performance and a compelling ensemble blended witty humor, bouts of profound pain, and love, ultimately raising lingering questions about the multifaceted depths of Lisa’s mental illness.

The play opened as Lisa, ceasing her neurotic fiddling with a guitar and reluctantly opening her front door, learns from watchmaker Victor Hesse (Cole V. Edick ’17) that she has lost an hour of her time on a transatlantic flight, leaving her unfocused and unbalanced. “Somehow, in all the temporal confusion of that instant, the hour that you surrendered—the hour that was rightfully yours—went astray!” Edick said in a frenzy as he orbited in a stop-motion path around Brooks like the second-hand of a clock, one of the many carefully attuned choices made by director Garrett C. Allen ’16. With a faltering tone and fidgeting body language, Brooks from the get-go made it clear, though, that Lisa’s struggles extended beyond the seemingly simplistic explanation Hesse has offered. In Brooks’ skillful hands (indeed, Brooks has shown her talents as an actress in previous Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club productions), Lisa elicited more than empathy; in an understated fashion, she broke open uncharted layers of the mind and, in turn, loosed the imagination.

Lisa dials the number that Hesse provided on a business card and follows the subsequent instructions—“You wish to correct a temporal disturbance. Your flat is now an elevator. To descend to Dissocia, please press 9”—and travels to Dissocia, a world in which a candy-coated exterior often belies darker inner-workings, features that Allen continued to tease out successfully. Under his direction, Lisa and her flat-elevator companions became the elevator, using just their bodies to convey the requisite motion, intimacy, and ambivalence, à la a 2008 theatrical adaptation of Hitchcock's “The 39 Steps.” In addition, Allen and the cast managed to emphasize the script’s striking blend of comical wordplay, song, and brutal, unsettling underpinnings, stretching and compressing time to heighten the believability of disbelief. At times reminiscent of Norton Juster’s childhood novel “The Phantom Tollbooth,” albeit with a darker flavor, the play poignantly tracked Lisa’s encounters with “insecurity guards” (Geoffrey G. Binney ’16 and Sara K. Rosenburg ’16, a painfully humorous and self-deprecating pair), an oathtaker-oatcake eater, a malicious scapegoat, and an elusive villain, the “Black Dog” king.

If Act I showcased the actors’ abilities to navigate the wacky and perverted world of “Dissocia,” Act II reinforced the play’s pathos, nuance, and relevance to the ongoing mental health dialogue on college campuses (in fact, the playbill provided the contact information for several on-campus resources). Swept clean of confetti, the bare-bones set—although still a precariously slanted raked platform—changed without much physical transformation into Lisa’s hospital room, staid and maddeningly silent except for the gentle taps of the attending nurses. Believable and sad, the situation in which Lisa found herself here stood in stark contrast to her active, surprisingly lucid declaration to the Dissocian associates at the end of the first act, a mere 15 minutes earlier: “I don’t want you all to be destroyed. But I’ve got a life too, and it’s off balance,” she said. “I’ve got people that I care about—that I love and that love me—and I’m letting them down.” These words packed a punch, raising questions about Lisa’s “wonderful world,” her reality, and the creative potential that lies beneath her mental illness.