If an 80-minute meditation on the subject of suicide in the run-on style of James Joyce is your idea of a provocative evening, you will be intrigued by "4.48 Psychosis," now playing at The Arts at Marks Garage. If not? You might still be gripped by its visual images.

The play's title is derived from the time of day when Kane — who battled mental illness before committing suicide in 1999 at the age of 28 — felt most awake and clear. Curiously, it is also the time when mental delusions are said to be their strongest.

There are moments of dark comedy in the script: "Went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the (expletive) waiting room half an hour." But Kinoshita's interpretation is unremittingly, dead-on serious.

There are no characters written into the script, so its staging is fully open to the director's interpretation. Kinoshita uses a chorus of voices surrounding a central character of the Girl.

"The most important aspect of staging was to show how the voices in her mind inflict the pain," Kinoshita said. "By creating these characters, the voices become as real to the audience as they are to the girl."

The Girl (Marissa Robello) is always in center focus and almost always closely circled by her negative voices (Kathy Hunter, in a pristine little black cocktail dress, and Reb Beau Allen in a shredded tuxedo) and a single positive voice (Ryan Sueoka, barefoot and in all white).

While the positive and negative voices literally arm-wrestle for prominence and bash each other with bone-crunching stage combat, the Girl spirals deeper toward her ultimate escape through suicide. Hopelessly looking on, the audience exists in a suspended state between madness and death.

Ultimately, the Girl silences the chorus and ritualistically represents her own suicide, kneeling over a bathtub and wiping her nearly nude body with red paint.