Marc Robinson

The Mind King Abdicates

Despite its caffeinated title, the characters’ libidinal bluster and short attention spans, and the violence cresting and subsiding so regularly it tears at the very seams of the stage, Richard Foreman’s new production, Panic! (How to Be Happy!), is most compelling when seen as a study of immobility. The four main actors — two women, one dressed in black and the other in white, and two men, one speaking in falsetto and the other in a low growl—embody the war of alternatives inhibiting all decisive action and thought in their world. Balance, here, doesn’t foster well-being. Instead, it arrests at their highest intensity numerous pairs of irreconcilable longings. Sexual obsession vies with revul-