AUGUSTINE, A 15-year-old housemaid admitted to Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital in 1875, became the "star" of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's famous lectures. With her vividly dramatic displays of hysteria, Augustine was at the center of Charcot's "Museum of Suffering," a peculiar form of Grand Guignol that transformed the suffering of psychotic patients into theater for the supposed edification of medical students. Augustine's self-conscious poses of agony and ecstasy were also captured by the new medium of photography and analyzed by Charcot and his disciples as highly stylized performances of female angst, a feat of acting said to have emulated the finest work of Sarah Bernhardt.

But while prodding Augustine into repeat "performances" via therapies ranging from ovarian compression to hypnosis, Charcot and his staff seem to have never given much attention or credence to Augustine's claim of having been raped at 13 by her mother's employer (and lover), a trauma she identified as the spur of her violent psychic attacks. This cycle of male obliviousness and exploitation is the primary target of British playwright Anna Furse's Augustine (Big Hysteria), making its U.S. premiere as the first production of the Shee Theatre Company. Furse imagines that Sigmund Freud (who was strongly influenced by Charcot's lectures at a later date) became Charcot's disciple during the Augustine years and found the inspiration for his "talking cure" in her and in his own opposition to Charcot's mechanical methods.

Both men are portrayed as products of their 19th-century milieu: hopelessly chauvinistic, sexually exploitative, emotionally detached, and ruthless in their need to aestheticize and romanticize psychoses. To Furse's Charcot (Michael Keys Hall), Augustine represents a masterpiece of feminine suffering worthy of hanging in the Louvre, while to Furse's Freud (Paul Silverman), Augustine's body is "a theater of forgotten scenes." But the playwright gives the greatest attention to Augustine (Laura Hope), a deeply suffering girl who nevertheless seems to enjoy elements of her victimhood, particularly when she can cannily exploit it to achieve a limited form of stardom. Her disease is characterized by an onstage violinist (Alice Wiley Pickett), portrayed as a fellow asylum inmate and silent partner. She does what the play's two men so conspicuously fail to do: she actually listens to Augustine and responds compassionately.

Furse's writing is unfailingly crisp and intelligent, and she exploits the inherent voyeurism of the theatrical act to parallel the prurient explorations of Charcot and Freud. The play is reminiscent of The Elephant Man, but Furse never transcends a certain neo-Brechtian archness, failing to render the hearts of her characters with anything but an outsider's gaze. The play also incorporates movement and multimedia, but their execution in this production fails to create much spark or insight. Hope is a powerhouse of physical and vocal technique in rendering Augustine's psychic extremity, but she never finds much dimension to the character beyond her pain. For all their pomposity and insensitivity, Charcot and Freud (Hall's portrayal is amusingly overbearing) emerge as more nuanced and engaging.

Director Virginia Reed maintains a sepulchral tone that dampens some of Furse's sharp humor, although she clearly relishes a witty pas de deux with cigars. Reed and scenic designer Melpomene Katakalos do fine work in reconfiguring the Exit on Taylor space to bring out a self-conscious theatricality, and Jane Sayer's lush period costumes help enormously in summoning up the characters' baroque, self-dramatizing world. But for all the craft and intelligence at work here, the evening seems to get stuck in a monotone of hysterical ravings and self-serving intellectualism.