Madness
When a play is set in a mental institution, one thing that is almost guaranteed is that one of the themes is going to be what constitutes sanity? Are those inside crazier than those outside? Is it the inmates or those running the asylum who are truly crazy? In this particular example, the theme of what constitutes madness is viewed through the lens of perspective. Other themes related to fidelity organically integrated into the thematic questioning of the constitutional basis for sanity, insanity and mental health in general.
Fidelity
The title of the play derives from Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutte which features a plot springing outward from its characters’ preoccupation with suspicions of infidelity. The opera becomes a play-within-the-play as a means for the patients inside the mental institution to examine their own concepts about the nature of love, truth and fidelity. One of the streams of this analysis is the manner in which notions of love and expectations of fidelity—especially of women—have changed or remained in stasis since Mozart’s day.
Reality and Illusion
Just as one should deservedly expect a play set in a mental institution to examine the nature of madness, so it is a given that when there is a play-within-a-play one of the dominant themes will be the nature of reality versus illusion. What makes this theme particularly more complex than usual is the addition layer of the play being performed by those for whom the edge between reality and illusion is already pretty thin to begin with. So, this theme is examined not just from the perspective of character versus “character” but also with the additional component of how patients already dealing with their own person perceptual issues attempting to define the difference between being a person and playing the part of another person. All of this is overlaid by the implicit question that must inevitably arise: how sane is it, really, for people to devote two hours of their life pretending to be others for the entertainment of an audience?
