A case of psychiatrist, shrink thyself

The others — and a few more besides — are the troubled patients seeking help at Northwood Mental Health Center, the fictional small-town facility “near the Berkshire Mountains” in which David Rabe’s “Good for Otto” is set. They and the staff are exhibits in the play’s attempted argument about a system that has itself gone mad.

Not that Dr. Robert Michaels — the one haunted by his mother — is to blame. As played by Ed Harris in the tedious New Group production that opened Thursday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, he is a good guy out of a ‘50s melodrama, quixotically fighting the bean counters in hopes of helping his patients. If he errs, it is on the side of over-involvement; he suffers, too smugly, from a savior complex.

A colleague, Evangeline Ryder (Amy Madigan), has better boundaries but might as well wear a sign proclaiming her a profound empath and active listener. Her patients include F. Murray Abraham, as a man who refuses to get out of bed, and Maulik Pancholy, as a man fresh out of the closet but no less lonely for it. Using therapeutic techniques that would not be unfamiliar to anyone who has ever taken an Intro Psych course, she cures one, if not the other.

Rabe is not usually so squishy. His trilogy of plays about Vietnam and its aftermath (“Sticks and Bones,” “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” “Streamers”) made him one of the indispensable dramatic voices of the 1970s. Later works, including “Hurlyburly” in 1984, brought the same coruscating moral vision to bear on other warlike ecosystems, like Hollywood, where he often worked as a screenwriter. My colleague Ben Brantley called the New Group’s 2005 revival “smashing.”

But “Good for Otto,” in which the battleground is the disturbed human psyche, is structured as a series of gassy monologues, most of them Michaels’, interspersed with scenes from therapy sessions and visits from Annoying Ghost Mom (Charlotte Hope). There are also jaunty musical interludes, in which the entire cast performs old-timey songs like “On Moonlight Bay.” These are accompanied on an upright piano by Kenny Mellman, of “Kiki and Herb” fame, who otherwise plays the pack rat.

That character drops out of the action, presumably so he can deal with the keyboard. The mother with the headaches disappears once Michaels reminds her that her son shot himself in the head — exactly where her headaches are! Nor is the crisis for which the play is named dwelt upon seriously. It occurs when a hamster named Otto, the pet of an autistic adult named Timothy (Mark Linn-Baker), requires abdominal surgery. Michaels and Evangeline patronize Timothy in his anxiety but he’s clearly comic relief, if not sufficiently.

The most difficult and enduring patient is Frannie, the young cutter, who flies into manic rages every time she visits her birth mother. The 13-year-old actor Rileigh McDonald and the veteran Rhea Perlman as her foster mother do their best to make these cardboard characters affecting, but the play works tirelessly against them. You will guess long before the therapist does what Frannie’s trigger is.

It doesn’t take much longer to see that Frannie and the others are merely Michaels’ triggers, narrowly crafted to elicit his own mama issues and to demonstrate the failings of the mental health system. That system is represented and caricatured here in the form of a saccharine, double-talking case manager (Nancy Giles) at Colossal Care Insurance. The name of the company gives you a sense of the halfhearted satire Rabe is purveying.

The problem of mental health coverage wants a fuller, more serious treatment than that. But the play uses the issue as topical bait. At every opportunity it turns away from a deeper engagement in any patient’s problems in favor of Michaels’, which despite Harris’ typically honest investment remain vague. His flights of dudgeon while trying to convince the insurance company to authorize proper care for Frannie pale next to his fantasies of taking the girl home so he can care for her himself. With his pesky, interfering ghost of a mother, that could make a brisk, hair-raising play; unfortunately, it’s not this one.

Rather, at nearly three hours, “Good for Otto” is a shapeless slog. Perhaps it was better served by its premiere production (with a different cast and director) at Chicago’s Gift Theater in 2015, which received positive reviews. Here, under Scott Elliott’s direction, it is unconvincing and overacted. Madigan gets closest to a coherent character, and Abraham, always confident with melodrama, grabs his depressive nothing of a role by the throat and makes it jump. But the interactions between the two are the only ones that make you believe therapy might ever do anyone any good.

That’s odd for a play that Rabe says was inspired by material from psychotherapist Richard O’Connor’s self-help book “Undoing Depression.” And odd for a play that, without providing much evidence, promotes its counselors and patients as brave emotional soldiers, doing the unheralded dirty work of exploring and improving the human condition.

You understand where its hopeful heart is: in the realm of movies like “Now, Voyager” and “Ordinary People” that ennoble the power of hard-won psychiatric insight, often accompanied by a music cue. But in trying to squeeze all that into a kaleidoscopic workplace dramedy, it achieves only a paradox: It makes mental illness seem just as uninteresting as its cure.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.