A precursor and very close cousin to Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, it imagines a meeting between those two champions of the unconscious mind Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí.

Such a meeting did occur, after Freud fled Vienna for London in 1938, but it was probably far more prosaic than this farcical fantasia. Hysteria adds a superego to Dalí's id and Freud's ego in the form of the Freud's physician, the disapproving Dr. Yahuda, and throws a mysterious and disgruntled (and occasionally naked) young woman named Jessica into the mix.

Dalí arrives at Freud's phallus-bedecked study to pay homage to his hero; no one knows why the girl is there; Yahuda can't seem to figure out what's going on - though he's pretty sure it involves deviant behavior - and Freud just wants a little peace and quiet so he can go gentle into that good night. It's a well-mapped craziness, with all roads, no matter how circuitous, ultimately leading home.

So it's all the more frustrating that director Jiri Zizka channels only some of the script's magic into this production. Alvin Epstein's Freud speaks in halting pauses, a deliberate directorial choice that has the dual effect of making Epstein sound like he's constantly struggling to recall his next line, and severing the connections between some of Johnson's best insights.

In one early scene, Freud, discussing the cancer cells that invaded his jaw and caused its partial removal, tells Mary McCool's Jessica, "They are the National Socialists of human meat," which works well enough for a laugh - but the next line, "best left, I felt, in Austria," comes too late and loses its punch.

And though I'm no analyst, I'm diagnosing McCool's struggling performance as a reaction to the obstacle of so much staggered dialogue, which forces her to breathe air into scenes that require give and take with Dr. Freud, but that instead seep tension like a leaky balloon.

However, Matthew Floyd Miller's Dalí has no such trouble staying aloft. Dressed like a grasshopper in a long, Easter-green frock coat, vest, and pants (designed by Janus Stefanowicz), he's his own show, sublime and ridiculous as surrealism itself, announcing, rather than speaking, every pidgin-English-studded line with wild-eyed brio.

It's up to Merwin Goldsmith's Yahuda to tether the action, and, in his brown suit and obdurate demeanor, he does, his earthy fustiness recalling Freud's lost old-country solidity.

And without giving too much away, I can say that Mimi Lien's off-kilter version of Freud's library - just odd enough, with its slanted doors and ceiling - gives way to a downright hallucinatory second-act set design (heavy on Dalí-esque symbolism) that should be a shoo-in come Barrymore Awards time.

Hysteria

Through June 14 at the

Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $39-$55. 215-546-7824

or www.WilmaTheater.org.