A waitress silently prepares for work. Her black-and-white uniform in place, she counts her teeth. No. 31 is AWOL, but she finds it somewhere behind her neck, and slides it back in place. Toes? All 10 are there. Belly button? Check.
This surrealistic mimed routine is opaque and mildly entertaining, like the 60 minutes that follow. Presented by Britain’s Inspector Sands company, “Hysteria” is basically an extended skit.
Once our waitress (Lucinka Eisler) is finally ready, she attends to an unnamed 20-something couple (Ben Lewis, Giulia Innocenti) on a first date. They’re co-workers, and things aren’t going smoothly. The woman is bubbly; the man is a social scientist with the kind of awkward manners commonly associated with academic nerds.
Occasionally, he steps aside to talk to the audience about his research, and once he pulls a theatergoer onto the stage to illustrate a point. Funny how audience participation has gone from dinner-theater trick to pseudo-experimental device. And yet, it still feels self-conscious and gratuitous, as if the show’s creators couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time and ours.
As we hop from digression to slapstick gag and back again, it’s hard to see what the point is. And we’re nowhere nearer figuring it out by the end of the show. Something about patterns of behavior? The ruthless world of dating? Hard to tell.
“Hysteria” prompts smiles here and there. The cast members get maximum mileage out of the gossamer-thin material. They’re particularly good at straining to hide embarrassment, especially when the date’s “getting to know you” session goes from banal (“What’s your favorite color?”) to slightly disturbing (“Would you rather be buried or cremated?”).
Also interesting is the use of sound effects and snippets of music — soothing pop, death metal — to represent what the characters think and how they feel.
Still, this doesn’t take us very far.
If “Hysteria” succeeds in one thing, it’s reminding us that absurd theater is hard to pull off. We’re far from Ionesco or Beckett here, and end up merely with an hour of head-scratching non sequiturs.