THEATER REVIEW : ‘Mother’Son’ Speaks Daggers About ‘Hamlet’

Words. Words. Words.

Imagine Shakespeare on a psychiatrist’s couch, racked with writer’s block. Fed up, the analyst interrupts his patient’s rant: “So the boy wants to sleep with his mother? So what?” The cured Bard dictates a tragedy titled “Mother’Son.” Instead of a medieval castle, we get a claustrophobic cell. Instead of a melancholy prince, we listen to a sadomasochistic mommy’s boy.

In other words, we get a 20th-Century version of “Hamlet.”

The trade-off has its merits, especially in the humor department. Who expected that grim incest could make us hoot and holler? At the Met Theatre, Raymond J. Barry’s tour-de-force accomplishment as writer and star of “Mother’Son” transforms psychosis into burlesque entertainment. No wonder Oscar-nominee Holly Hunter co-produced this avant-garde talkathon where every sexual and intellectual impulse is given full voice--it’s the flip side to the mute Victorian repression of “The Piano.”

“Mother’Son” is also indebted to Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”--too much so. Its derivative structure conceals a lack of substance. Like most psychodrama, this ritual exorcism is truly much ado about nothing, even though the sound and fury prove entertaining.

In an ominous gray cinder-block room with a single high window, Barry’s Son paces like Beckett’s Clov, obsessively debating his keeper. Here the jailer-figure is Mother, but otherwise the situation is uncomfortably close to Beckett’s. Even the haunted room (brilliantly designed by Yael Pardess) resembles the space in “Endgame,” metaphorically representing a prison cell as well as a brain.

But similar to his 1989 hit “Once in Doubt,” Barry writes hilarious Joycean soliloquies and solipsistic arguments. As an actor, his delirium possesses a trance-like mania that makes us laugh even as we note the homicidal menace underneath. (Barry’s role as a police chief in the cinematic comedy “The Ref” makes a similar impression.) Straitjacketed in a size-too-small suit coat, tottering like a shy little boy, this Far Side weirdo skips and chants, “Hi, Ma.”

As if answering a Freudian call for help, his mother materializes, pushing a salad-cart, eager to force-feed her son. Judy Jean Berns becomes the archetypal mom from hell. Smothering, seductive, castrating, Berns is the perfect acting mate to Barry. A deadly duo, they merge into a grotesque vaudeville team: Norman Bates and mother, Oedipus and wife, Charles Manson and Norma Desmond.

But just as in “Once in Doubt,” the repetitive arguments lose momentum and force the playwright to manufacture an intruder. Here it’s the girlfriend crashing through the wall, coming to the rescue like RoboCop. Kim O’Kelley’s entrance is stunning, but the rest of her work can’t compete with the mother-son dynamic. We know he’s bound and determined to murder mom.

The predictable conclusion is a limp stab at significance. It’s more than an ethical reach to try and make the stylish but hollow “Mother’Son” a statement about our culture’s addiction to sex and violence--it’s overkill. Until that fatal aesthetic flaw, director David Saint adroitly suspends our sense of disbelief, projecting the illusion of theater as therapy.

* “Mother’Son,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Wednesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 17. $15. (213) 957-1152. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.