Review: In ‘Squeamish,’ It’s the Therapist Who’s Troubled

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The playwright and director Aaron Mark likes to tell creepy stories in the dark, or as close as he can get to it. Two seasons ago, when Daphne Rubin-Vega played a woman with a grisly past in Mr. Mark’s monologue “Empanada Loca,” the glow of a trash-can fire illuminated the gloom. “Squeamish,” his ghoulish new play starring Alison Fraser, is also a one-woman affair. Presented by All for One Theater in the Beckett Theater at Theater Row, it, too, is cloaked in an unusually enveloping blackness.

It is the middle of the night in a psychiatrist’s home office on the Upper West Side, and Sharon is explaining how she’s been for the past five months, ever since she went off her antidepressants and stopped checking in. “Let’s just say, a lot’s happened,” she says, settled comfortably into a leather wing chair. (The set and its dusky-dim lighting are by Sarah Johnston.)

Chipper and well put together, with a cultured voice whose lilt is a charming remnant of her Texas past, Sharon is a psychotherapist. If at first she doesn’t seem in dire need of an emergency session about her own troubles, listen awhile. She could use way more drastic help than that.

Like Ms. Rubin-Vega’s subterranean dweller and the charismatic psychopath Tom Hewitt played in Mr. Mark’s “Another Medea,” Sharon is an entertaining raconteur whose ordinary life has taken a Grand Guignol turn. She’s just back from Texas, where she went for the funeral of her beloved nephew, Eddie.

The strange thing about Eddie, who was 24, is how he died: bleeding out in the bathtub, as Sharon’s mother did decades before. Just like her, he had cut marks all over his body.

At the funeral, Eddie’s sweet-voiced sprite of a girlfriend, Cara, comforts her fellow mourners cheerfully. When she turns up later at Sharon’s hotel, the two women bond. Then Cara lets Sharon in on a certain gruesome secret about Eddie.

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