A playwright looks inward to understand the reasons we act out

NEW YORK - Christopher Shinn's devotion to psychoanalysis runs as deep as the lies, betrayals, and self-deceptions perpetrated by the characters in his provocative plays. Not only does Shinn see a therapist five days a week, but he's currently completing a fellowship with the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he worships at the altar of two of the self-scrutinizing giants of modern drama, O'Neill and Ibsen, who wrote with brutal honesty about themselves and the human condition.

Yet it's in Shinn's own plays that he most sharply demonstrates his comittment to probing the deep recesses of the human psyche. His latest, "Dying City," is now getting its first major US staging outside New York, courtesy of the Lyric Stage Company.

Shinn's fascination with psychoanalysis stems from a dark period during his undergraduate years at New York University. Twenty years old and on the brink of adulthood, the young gay writer had become increasingly frustrated at the self-destructive, irrational behavior that seemed to be swirling all around him. His relationship with his first serious boyfriend had started to founder for reasons that weren't immediately apparent, and his friends were making choices that he couldn't reconcile.

"Why would someone hurt themselves? Why would someone not capitalize on his talent? Why would someone end a relationship that was a good one? I couldn't fig ure out the answers to these questions, and it drove me crazy," says the 32-year-old Shinn over coffee in a cozy cafe near his apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "I really felt desperate, and I didn't understand why people were behaving the way they do. I didn't understand why I was behaving the way that I did. And I found it very traumatizing."

Shinn began seeing a therapist, and several years later, after his father died following a battle with leukemia, the playwright became increasingly hooked on making sense of the murky, complex universe of the psyche - both in life and in his art.

"Dying City," which premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London last year, marks Shinn's most psychologically piercing and richly textured drama yet. Hailed by critics and audiences in its off-Broadway run earlier this year, the play is a devastating look at the brutal betrayals and emotional savagery that we inflict upon the people we supposedly love.

The drama begins when Peter (Chris Thorn) shows up unannounced at the apartment of the widowed therapist Kelly (Jennifer Blood), whose husband Craig was killed in the Iraq war the previous year. Peter is Craig's gay twin brother and an up-and-coming actor with a narcissistic streak. Even though he has been living in New York for months, he and Kelly haven't spoken to each other since Craig's funeral.

The play skips back and forth between this scene and the day before Craig, also played by Thorn, departs on his fateful tour of duty. Perspectives shift, characters' motivations are revealed, and Shinn slowly begins to illuminate the tension that had long been simmering between husband and wife.

While post-9/11 politics and collective grief informed the writing of the play, Shinn says that the real inspiration for "Dying City" was something more personal - wanting to explore the challenge of integrating sexuality and truth in intimate relationships.

"Being truthful as a sexual being is something that I think a lot of people have trouble with. Most of us have had at least one relationship that failed in an emotionally violent or upsetting way - we were deceived, or something bad was done to us," says Shinn. "And then it seemed like there was so much happening in the world that I could draw a connection with."

The characters' power struggles and the emotional minefields they must navigate mirror what's happening in the wider social and political sphere. The play also suggests that we need to look inward to better understand the causes of the war in which our nation is embroiled.

"If you look at the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib, I believe that kind of sexual aggression is latent in people, and the war unleashed it," says Shinn. "Certainly, the stated intent of the war was not to go in there and humiliate and sadistically torture Iraqis. Just as in a relationship between two people, hopefully the intent is never to betray them in a violent or sexual way. So I was interested in the idea of good intentions becoming perverted. What is the churning drive within each of us that manifests itself in these horrible ways?"

This is territory that the bracingly candid Shinn has mined before. In his debut drama, "Four," a quartet of lonely, sex-starved souls grasp for human connection. In "Where Do We Live," a group of New York inhabitants begin to psychically unravel in an increasingly fractured city. "I think all my plays are about the diffi- culty of integrating who we are with the world we live in," says Shinn.

The playwright studs his gripping dialogue with awkward, telling silences as his characters struggle to articulate or obscure their true feelings. "I think he has a really good sense of what's really happening when we're not talking to one another," Thorn says by phone after a recent rehearsal.

" 'Dying City' is a breakthrough for him," raves Daniel Gidron, who is directing the Lyric production. "I really liked his other plays, but when I read this play for the first time, I couldn't put it down. It's psychologically richer and the themes are more striking than before."

While Shinn has emerged as one of the theater's most provocative and promising voices, response to his work wasn't always favorable. In fact, while he was a student in the dramatic writing program at NYU in the mid-1990s, he struggled to even land readings of his plays. After graduating in 1997, he sent "Four" to every major nonprofit and regional theater in America and was roundly rejected.

Out of options, Shinn tried to get produced overseas. He flew to England and mailed copies of his plays to all the major British theaters. In his cover letter to the Royal Court, he brazenly wrote that he thought "Four" was better than two recent Royal Court imports that had successfully made their way to New York - Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and (Expletive)."

"I don't know what possessed me to say that. I think I wanted to grab their attention and just say, 'I'm really good. I believe in myself,' " says Shinn, who now teaches in the MFA program at the New School for Drama in New York.

Still, he was stunned when the Royal Court offered to stage "Four" the following season. Despite the surprise, Shinn felt vindicated. Since then, the Royal Court has premiered four of his plays. While most of his work has since been produced in New York, Shinn has been outspoken in his distaste for the development process at American theaters.

"How can you judge a play from a reading that's based on only one or two hours of rehearsal? If I'm a painter, wouldn't you wait to see my painting before you decide whether or not to buy it?" he asks.

The alternative, suggests Shinn, is for the theaters "to read the play and imagine with all their soul what a fully realized production would look like. That takes a lot of work. And a lot of these people don't want to sit down with a play and fully engage with it because it's really exhausting."

Growing up in Hartford, Shinn demonstrated an interest in the performing arts that was sparked by his mother, who had been frustrated in her own creative pursuits as a child. Shinn remembers attending the Yul Brynner tour of "The King and I" in Boston and observing his mother enraptured by the performance. He also recalls going to the movies with his parents and his usually reserved dad tearing up at the end of "Field of Dreams," when the father and son play catch.

"In those areas where he was frozen in his real life, suddenly a work of art could thaw him out. And watching my mother being so moved at these performances, it was intoxicating," says Shinn. "That was very formative - seeing how much you, as an artist, can reach people and grab them in an emotional way."

Although such insights have helped Shinn understand how his own personality has developed, he acknowledges that humans are in many ways unknowable - a theme of his writing as well.

"[Psychoanalysis] is helpful," he says. "But it also deepens the mystery. And it deepens the mystery in a way that's not frightening or traumatizing. It's very liberating to recognize that humans are irreducibly complex, and that no amount of thinking about oneself or others will ever fully illuminate us."