Review: APPREHENSION by L.B. Deyo, Holi Shamoli Productions, Austin
by Brian Paul Scipione

 

 Have you ever stared at Niagara Falls? It is beautiful in its chaos, so mesmerizing you can’t help but feel enchanted and overwhelmed at the same time. It's impossible to stand there without imagining what it would feel like to jump in. This is the feeling I had while watching the theatrical spectacle Apprehension. The play draws a razor-thin line between comedy and drama while showcasing true-to-life characters at one of the most consequential moments of their lives. You don’t want to be in their shoes any more than you want to jump into a raging waterfall, but this performance is so visceral and in your face that you're forced to consider it all. To consider leaning closer to the abyss of most unquiet desperation and realize it's staring back at you.

 

That's paraphrasing Nietzsche, of course, as this is just one of the many elements that sets the play’s rumbling, growl-y, and unrelentingly seductive tone. In the full quote, Nietzsche writes “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Herein also lies the crux of the story, which is summarized on the production website: “A paranoid psychological thriller about Joe Dempsey, a man tormented by memory lapses and gnawing doubts about his own past. During a period of emotional collapse, Joe begins to suspect that his wife and friends are not who they seem to be.”

 

Nietzsche, who found little good company in his life, finds plenty here. There are references to Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Kafka. Early in the play, there’s an exchange about the Dostoevsky quote "If there is no God then everything is permissible." Joe has muddled up the absence of God with the absence of reality. Yet another fine line that can alter an individual’s entire cosmology and view of the what is happening around here?

 

 

 

Although Joe is not simply floundering. He's not merely overwhelmed or storm-tossed. As played by the incomparable Brent Werzner, Joe is fighting tooth and nail with the tendrils of reality he is left, trying to weave a reality. He cycles through the gamut of his crushing emotions like a whirling dervish, absolutely sure one moment and utterly broken and unable to get up off the ground the next. A lesser actor might have chosen to a simpler interpretation of the character; Werzner channels, night after night, the horrific internal journey of a mentally tortured soul and displays all its external tragedy. This is acting on the most difficult level .  It recalled for me the best performances I have ever seen: Judd Hirsch in Conversations with My Father, Brent Carver in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Jason Asprey in Paradise Drag. The journey Werzner takes has no map and no signposts outside of L.B. Deyo’s funereal, drum-taut script. It is deeply personal and left open for all to see, like a wound that’s just lost its scab.

 

Joe's immediate and primary foil is his wife Ava, portrayed by Jennymarie Jemison. That's purely casting par excellence. For every one of Werzner’s actions she returns the volley with a  more than equal opposite reaction. He's drowning and thrashing, she's thriving and fighting. This is like a tsunami colliding with a forest fire. Ava parries his philosophical thrusts with practical and shrewd observations that later evolve into action. It's a fictional marriage on par with that of Burton and Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's a car crash in slow motion from which the wife is punching her way out through the windshield. Jemison has created a character that is a post-The-Feminine-Mystique Zelda Fitzgerald, supporting Joe while utterly refusing to take his sh*t. By the play’s midpoint Joe’s psyche has been stretched like a rubber band to the point of decolorization and Ava is there to watch it snap with the eyes of a hawk. And in the second act she turns it up to eleven by exposing her character’s emotional struggles as she reaches her own breaking point.

 

There’s a striking resemblance between Jemison and Jessica Brynn Cohen ,who plays her daughter Katie. Cohen’s performance is far beyond her years. As in poetry, she says the most when saying nothing at all: filling the negative space with glances, grins, grimaces, and gracefulness that convey her character’s fraught journey as the daughter of a family in constant turmoil. Katie is the yang to her mother’s yin, doing everything she can to assuage her father’s pain. Jeff Mills as the Ned-Flander-esque Dr. Wozis is a powerhouse of comic relief. Mills, like most of the cast, is Austin theater royalty, known for his range and capacious depth. Here he achieves the seemingly improbable task of lightening the mood in comic sections. Here is an interesting contradiction: the play manages to be humorous even in its darkest moments, and an underlying impression of theater of the absurd reigns throughout. And Mills is able to push that envelope even further by simply calling out for a margarita.

 

Sonnet Blanton’s direction is the gravity that keeps these celestial bodies from crashing into one another. Her hands-on, hands-off style of directing is the essential element and makes this production achieve its highest potential. A true catcher in the rye, she keeps her cast far from the cliffs of overacting, underacting, and the ever-present potential of utter chaos that can consume a production dealing with so many grand sociological and philosophical themes. Something is happening to Joe. It is indisputable and yet the characters around him are eerily ignoring his breakdown. Blanton adroitly directs many storylines simultaneously despite the intentional, inherent disconnects in the characters' relationships. By finding a way to maintain the essential validity of each one’s story, she creates a meta experience which in the hands of a lesser director would resut in cacophony. Having been fortunate to sit in on one of the first read-throughs, I was able to witness firsthand the effects of her emotional curation of the actors.

 

In a world obsessed with remakes and reboots, Apprehension stands out as an authentically original work that dares to show the uncomfortable side of depression and delusional paranoia, as well as the  psychological distress that plagues so many people in our current dystopian landscape. Deyo set the bar with his deeply personal and resonant script. Blanton and company do not balk.

 

The performance has no intermission, and this review focuses only on the first half of the story. There are many supernatural, musical, and plot developments I have intentionally not covered, not for worry of spoilers, but because the culmination of the plot is appropriately colossal. The only appropriate way to describe it is with similes. 

 

Niagara Falls, for example.

 

                 

 

 

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Apprehension
by L.B. Deyo
Holi Shamoli Productions

October 9 - November 1, 2025

Thursday, Friday, & Saturday evenings at 8 pm

Thursday will be pay-what-you-can nights

Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd Street, Austin

Tickets now on sale - $32.00 + fees & taxes

Tickets can be purchased through the Apprehension Play website  https://www.apprehensionplay.com.

Approximate run time is 90-100 minutes with no intermission.