Uta Hagen, Rising Above the Lines

A legend is playing a legend when Uta Hagen appears in the title role of "Mrs. Klein," Nicholas Wright's drama about the pioneering psychoanalyst, which opened last night at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater. This is the actress who played Nina with the Lunts in "The Seagull" and Desdemona to Paul Robeson's Othello, who originated Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" You expect Great Acting from her, and that's what you get. Her performance is an immensely impressive technical tour de force.

"Mrs. Klein" takes place shortly after Melanie Klein, who has fled Hitler's Germany and settled in London, hears that her only son has been killed in a mountain-climbing accident in Hungary. As she prepares to go to the funeral, she takes on an assistant to edit her latest proofs: Paula (Amy Wright), another refugee psychoanalyst who hero-worships Klein and hopes to become her patient. Into this situation storms Melitta (Laila Robins), Klein's unhappy daughter -- and also an analyst -- who is convinced that her brother committed suicide and it's all Mom's fault.

The play is very, very old-fashioned -- much talk and lots of accusations, confrontations and revelations. No one actually behaves this way in life, but at least Nicholas Wright has made his characters psychoanalysts. If any people are likely to talk an issue to the grave and beyond, it's going to be these three. Monstrously overarticulate, they're like a parody of characters in chatty "realistic" drama, coming up instantly with analyses of their emotions and talking about themselves at inordinate length.

Their egotism and over-intellectualism are actually funny, but no one involved in the production seems to have realized this. Wright works in a couple of jokes, but mostly he just works his emotional triangle of mother, daughter and would-be daughter. The play is too long and too predictable. There's some meant-to-be-suspenseful stuff with a letter, but it's obvious early on where the evening is headed. It gets there, after a lot of explosive conversations in which one of the three actresses has to go and stand looking out the window or something while the other two have at it in a big dramatic way.

As Wright isn't informative or even particularly satiric about psychoanalytic theory, and as his story isn't very compelling, everything is left up to the actors. They sink their teeth into the script as if it were better fare than it is. Amy Wright brings a mixture of vulnerability and untrustworthiness to the usurper Paula, and Robins rages elegantly as Melitta. Hagen negotiates Klein's journey of loss with extraordinary, almost clinical perfection: Every sigh, every outburst, every gesture is in the absolutely correct place. You could subtitle this evening "Master Class" as Hagen, as renowned a teacher as she is an actress, demonstrates the skills honed over a lifetime.

Mrs. Klein, by Nicholas Wright.
Directed by William Carden. Set, Ray Recht; lighting, Chris Dallos; costumes, David C. Woolard; sound, Robert Auld and Duncan Edwards.
At the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater through Oct. 20. Call 202-467-4600.