The Hysterical Alphabet

Newcity says: “Theater Oobleck’s The Hysterical Alphabet is a beautifully nuanced mixture of historical treatise, medical discourse and poetic archive, chronicling the sometimes hilarious, often horrifying saga of the “female malady” that is hysteria throughout the centuries. The trio packs an astounding amount of information into little more than an hour’s time—delivering a lesson that is wickedly funny, surprisingly heart-wrenching and not to be missed.”

The Hysterical Alphabet, our acclaimed touring multi-media historico-medical provocation is coming to Rice University in Houston.

The show — a collaboration between author Terri Kapsalis, video-collagist Danny Thompson, and sound artist John Corbett — is being presented by the School of the Humanities, the Humanities Research Center, the English Department, and the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.

This hit was last presented in Chicago in 2008, and has since been touring American campuses. So far it has been seen at The Art Institute of Chicago, Notre Dame, Carleton College, Bates College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Clark University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Emory College.

An appreciation of the performance at Emory is here … to quote:

“In a refreshingly non-didactic, yet pedagogical performance, Theater Oobleck’s The Hysterical Alphabet, is an example of what a 21st-century hybrid of art and scholarship might be.”