Sarah Kane’s drama comes to New York in a Polish production by TR Warszawa

When Robin Williams took his own life earlier this year, we collectively wondered how such a brilliant mind could be driven to a pit of deep despair. Depression is a serious illness, one that creeps up when you least expect it. It doesn’t care who you are or how successful you are. It just wants to eat you alive. Some insight into this disease is granted in Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, a gut-punching exploration of clinical depression first produced in 2000, a year after its young author committed suicide. The jagged-edged drama takes its title from the darkest point of the day, 4:48am, when Kane would often find herself awakened from her slumber. With no stage directions or delineated characters, her text is open for interpretation. In the hands of director Grzegorz Jarzyna and Poland’s TR Warszawa at St. Ann’s Warehouse 4:48 Psychosis is a traumatic, almost unwatchable experience. Jarzyna rearranges the original script and finds a mostly coherent throughline, at the center of which is an unnamed blonde protagonist (Magdalena Cielecka) who could stand in for Kane herself (the play is believed to be semiautobiographical). “I am sad,” she says, peering out from the darkness. “I feel that the future is hopeless and things cannot improve.” Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t make love to her significant other (Katarzyna Herman). What doctors prescribe just numbs the senses. There’s only one way out.