Play Comes Across as a Freudian Slip

Who, outside of his acolytes, remembers that Sigmund Freud’s last book was about Moses?

Playwright and ultra-prolific biographer Charles Higham does, and his insert of this detail into his drama about Freud and his conflicts with 1935 bourgeois Viennese society, “Storm in Heaven,” at the Bitter Truth Theatre, is a sign of Higham’s research.

It’s an especially poignant fact, since Freud’s swan song was being written at the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism--the portentous backdrop for the play’s domestic events.

Research, however, doesn’t necessarily translate into a fine play, and the gap between pure facts and inspired theatrics isn’t bridged in the text or in director Joen Nielsen Lewis’ stiff, prosaic production.

The early scenes suggest Ibsen’s middle-class parlor rooms, with face-offs between obscenely self-satisfied men of good standing and one independent-minded individual ready to strip away the veneer and reveal the scum infecting their lives.

In one corner are the likes of powerful Judge Stefan Straub (Eoin Ryan) and esteemed Dr. Carl Feldman (Stuart Thompson). In the other is Straub’s strong-willed daughter, Ida (Elizabeth Anne Springett), whose only moral support comes from her beau, Franz (Gavin Perry), an intern under Feldman.

It’s bad enough that Ida and her crabby, caustic mother, Hilda (Leslie Simms), are at permanent loggerheads. But during a dinner at the Straub home, Ida lets loose with a tirade against Carl, accusing him of a molestation that sent her into depression and coughing spasms.

Her anger is enough to distract these Jewish families from worrying about the Nazis making a ruckus in the streets. Conveniently enough, Stefan’s friend, Dr. Freud (Dana White), also happens to be a dinner guest and a witness to Ida’s accusations.

Freud takes her on as a patient, and indicates that--unlike her shocked bourgeois family--he’s willing to believe her.

Higham is inventing a great deal of this, but in the private session between doctor and patient, he tries to dramatize Freud’s reported tendency (currently being debated among psychoanalysts and their critics) to aggressively dispute his patients’ interpretations of their dreams and behavior.

The interplay between White and Springett isn’t nearly as charged as it should be, and the compression of what would have been at least a few sessions into one tends to make this already stagy play too artificial by half.

Higham’s Freud, researched though he may be, is a detective of the mind who gets to the heart of the crime far too quickly and neatly: Faced with a vexing case as an old man, rather than stumbling toward conclusions, he has a ready theory at hand within minutes.

Higham weights too much of his play toward family squabbles that are lacking in Ibsen-like emotional truth, and away from Freud’s investigation; and the third-act revelations play closer to Agatha Christie, reducing “Storm in Heaven” to a whodunit rather than the morality drama it initially seemed to be.

And it hardly helps that Lewis’ staging is not only crammed into the Bitter Truth’s tiny space but also tends to line the characters up in a row, giving them the visual sense of being stick figures.

The decision for the cast to speak in heavily inflected Germanic accents mostly succeeds, although White struggles with it along the way, and Thompson strongly projects the prideful face of a moneyed hypocrite.

*

“Storm in Heaven,” Bitter Truth Theatre, 11050 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Ends Sunday. $15. (818) 755-7900. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.