Suppressed Desires: A Comedy in Two Scenes

She came for the holidays. By breakfast, her sister had diagnosed her marriage.

New York, 1915. Mabel has crossed the ocean from London to spend the holiday season with her clever older sister, Henrietta, in a studio apartment on Washington Square. But Henrietta has discovered the latest craze, psychoanalysis, and she has been practicing on everyone. Her husband Steve can’t sleep because she keeps waking him to ask what he’s dreaming.

So when Mabel mentions a silly dream about being a hen, Henrietta knows exactly what it means, and packs her off to the fashionable Dr. Russell. Two weeks later the analysis comes back. It’s not the answer anyone expected, least of all Henrietta.

A warm, quick-witted comedy about a fad taken far too seriously, and a family that survives it.

Adapted from the play by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, written 1914. It was first staged in 1915 by the Provincetown Players, the little theatre group that went on to launch Eugene O’Neill.

Featuring:

Monique Nicole as Henrietta

Charlotte Mariko as Mabel

Eric VanRensselear as Stephen

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Cover image: Bain News Service, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-23106).