Don Nigro

Dark Sonnets of the Lady Don Nigro

Drama / Characters: 4 male, 4 female

Scenery: Unit set

A finalist for the 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.