Nicole Jeannine Smith gave a brilliant performance in Sarah Kane’s shocking, seldom-performed last work for the theater. Written shortly before Kane’s suicide, the play is impressionistic, jagged, painfully honest, cryptic, literate, and devastating. Whether confessing her mental illness, facing another psychiatrist, popping psychotropic drugs, or anguishing over a love affair, Smith’s Kane — directed by Giles Davies — was so emotionally authentic, you had to believe that she was enduring a dangerous clinical depression before your eyes. It’s artistic candor like this that got some of us hooked on theater in the first place; what a relief to find it even in this limited-time, low-budget run.
