‘Woman’ Balances Comedy and Tragedy

While the always-dramatic multiple personality disorder figures prominently in “The Illustrated Woman,” a kind of Kentucky-fried “Sybil” at the Court Theatre, playwright Nancy Kiefer tries to broaden her focus from the extreme aberration of the affliction to its more commonly encountered causes.

In so doing, she draws heavily on prevailing psychological theory suggesting fractured identities aren’t so much a true mental illness as the desperate response of a healthy mind attempting to cope with unbearable trauma--in this case, sexual abuse.

Her heroine, Jane Ellen Whitman (Lyndie Benson), is a gifted poet who at age 17 lost her ability to read after repeated molestation by her low-life father (Paul Linke) and total neglect by her self-absorbed mother (Leslie Easterbrook). Now barely functional, she’s dismissed by everyone as “just plain loony” because of her abrupt mood swings and memory blackouts.

In the play’s 1935 setting, Jane Ellen’s condition doesn’t fit a glib clinical diagnosis. There’s something spooky and unsettling in the lightning shifts between her principal “selves”--a mousy, deferential introvert and a cigarette-puffing, inquisitive tomboy--transitions skillfully handled in Benson’s affecting performance.

Her anguish plays nicely against Easterbrook’s breezy and frequently comic hedonism. Laughs and tragedy stay nicely balanced in Stephen Rothman’s inexorably tension-building staging.

But the piece runs into trouble with the father, a character who lapses into one-note melodrama. In place of Linke’s over-the-top caricature, a sociopathic veneer of normality would make this villain far more sinister--and much less easy to dismiss as an aberration.

* “The Illustrated Woman,” Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays -- Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 4 p.m. Ends Oct. 22. $15-$18. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.