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BEYOND THERAPY by Christopher Durang

Back in the '20s, when the subject was new, everybody enjoyed a good joke about analysis, and even Sigmund Freud was heard to repeat a popular limerick:

A progressive young lady of Rheims

Had confessed some astonishing dreams

And was justly annoyed

When the great Doctor Freud

Said: "A surfeit of chocolate creams."

The jokes have never stopped, but rarely have they been so funny as they are in Christopher Durang's newest comedy, which opened on Broadway last week. Screwball and scatty, with as much owed to the Marx brothers as to the Viennese brethren, Beyond Therapy offers the best therapy of all: guaranteed laughter.

Bruce is a lawyer who has put an ad in a sex paper for a female companion. Prudence is a writer from PEOPLE magazine who has answered it, and the two meet for dinner. It is hate at first bite, and next morning the two retreat to their analysts to find out what went wrong. The answer is obvious. Despite some astonishing dreams, Prudence (Dianne Wiest) is all prudence, afraid of saying yes, no or maybe, while Bruce (John Lithgow) is bisexual. He wants to get married and move to the suburbs—where his lover Bob would live above the garage.

Durang's analysts are not much help. In fact, they seem to be more in need of assistance than their patients. Her analyst (Peter Michael Goetz) bitterly complains that none of his patients talk. His analyst (Kate McGregor-Stewart) belongs to the I'm-O.K., you're-O.K. school, which tells the kooks that they are fine—everyone else is crazy. "When you were mad at me, you pulled out your toy gun and shot me," she tells Bob (Jack Gilpin). "That's the beginning of mental health."

Boy, of course, meets girl again—and boy too—as Durang's plot, which has more odd bounces than a pinball game, goes from the unexpected to the unpredicted. He lulls his audience with a commonplace soap-opera line, then happily jolts it with another that is neither common or in place, providing two hours of hilarious surprises. He has a fine ensemble cast trying on his Freudian slips. Lithgow and Wiest are both funny and touching as the couch-crossed lovers, while Goetz and McGregor-Stewart, who could not shrink a wool sock, provide more than a few expansive belly laughs. Director John Madden is wise enough to know that the humor is not only in the words, but in the pauses between. —By Gerald Clarke