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Dark Sonnets of the Lady, The (Nigro)

  • Don Nigro
  • Full Length Play, Drama, 1900-1910
  • 4M, 4F
  • ISBN: 9780573693120

This funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women - a tragic love story laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.

More information

Description

  • Full Length Play
  • Drama
  • 120 minutes

  • Time Period: 1900-1910
  • Target Audience: Adult
  • Set Requirements: Unit Set/Multiple Settings
  • Cautions: Intense Adult Themes

  • Performance Group:
  • Large Stage, Community Theatre, Professional Theatre, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups, College Theatre / Student

  • Accolades:
  • Finalist! National Play Award
This funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. 

Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brother, a sinister admirer with a seductive wife, and a lost little governess. 

Nightmares, fantasies, hallucinations and memories materialize on stage in a kaleidoscopic tapestry as Freud moves closer and closer to the truth about Dora's murky past. Is Dora sick or is the corrupt patriarchal society in which she and Freud are trapped the source of a complex group neurosis that binds the characters together in a web of desperate erotic relationships? 

The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women. This tragic love story is laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.

Premiere Production: First produced at the Ohio State University Department of Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, in April 1985. It was directed by the author. It received its regional premiere at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, under artistic director Nagle Jackson, in 1988. It was directed by Robert Lanchester.

Characters

  • Casting: 4M, 4F
  • Casting Attributes: Ensemble cast

FREUD - mid-forties
FATHER - forties
MOTHER - forties
DORA - eighteen
WOLF - twenties
HERR KLIPPSTEIN - late thirties
FRAU KLIPPSTEIN - thirty
MARCY - twenty

Available Material

Name Price
Dark Sonnets of the Lady, The (Nigro) Script Order Now

This funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brother, a sinister admirer with a seductive wife, and a lost little governess. Nightmares, fantasies, hallucinations and memories materialize on stage in a kaleidoscopic tapestry as Freud moves closer and closer to the truth about Dora's murky past. Is Dora sick or is the corrupt patriarchal society in which she and Freud are trapped the source of a complex group neurosis that binds the characters together in a web of desperate erotic relationships? The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women. This tragic love story is laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.

$24.95

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