Freudian Excuse / Theatre

Freudian Excuses in Theatre.

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• In All Shook Up Matilda has one for the way she acts as mayor.
• Joseph Pitt from Angels in America had a rough relationship with his now-gone father. During a phone conversation with his mother, he asks if his father ever loved him. She dodges the question. When he tells her that he's gay, she snaps that he knows damn well his father never loved him, and that's no excuse for him to be acting up like this.
  • Later on, discussing her son's homosexuality with his wife, she says "...they think it's mothers who are close to their sons that cause this. Well, guess we disproved that theory, he and I."
• Freddie's song "Pity the Child" in Chess:
  Pity the child who has ambition
  Knows what he wants to do
  Knows that he'll never fit the system
  Others expect him to
  Pity the child who knew his parents
  Saw their faults, saw their love die before his eyes
  Pity a child that wise
  • In the Swedish version of the show, Molokov gets "Glöm Mig Om Du Kan" (roughly translated to "Forget Me If You Can"), where it's revealed his devotion to the Russian Revolution caused his lover Natasha to leave him. As such, his believe in sacrifice for the greater good motivates his manipulations throughout the show.
• The actor playing Cox in the stage version of Nation decided to give his character one of these (dead wife and son), as his diary exercise for the character reveals (on page 22).
• In Chicago, Roxie Hart sings a line in the song "Roxie" that goes "And the audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for loving them, And I love them for loving me. And we love each other. That's because none of us got enough love in our childhoods."
• The trope namer is Freud's essay "Character Types Encountered in Psychoanalytic Work," in which he argues that we sympathize with the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare's Richard III because, in the play's opening monologue, he explains that he is evil because he is ugly: "What he is saying is: Nature has committed a grave injustice in denying me the comeliness of form that wins the love of others. Life owes me some compensation and I shall have it."
• In How I Learned to Drive Lil Bit comes to the conclusion that her abusive Uncle Peck was abused as well "Now that I'm old enough, there are some questions I would have liked to have asked him. Who did it to you, Uncle Peck? How old were you? Were you eleven?"
• Bradley and Tilden were abused by their parents in Buried Child, leading to Bradley's aggressive nature and Tilden's dissociation.
• In Pokémon: The Mew-sical, Giovanni's mother killed his pet Pikachu, prompting him to capture Ash's, as he wants to believe it's his old Pikachu.
• In Shrek: The Musical, Lord Farquaad's backstory is delivered in "The Ballad of Farquaad" about his mother that died when he was young and his distant father that left him alone in the woods when he was younger. Subverted later when it turns out that his past wasn't as hopeless as he made it out to be.
  Farquaad: No father of mine would've abandoned me in the woods as a child!
  Farquaad's Father: Abandoned you?! You were twenty-eight! And living in my basement!
• In this case it's the hero rather than the villain, but the titular protagonist of the Mrs. Hawking play series has harbored bitter resentment towards her father ever since, after ignoring her for most of her life, he forced her to get married whether she wanted to or not. It was a major contributing factor in her present-day inability to trust men.
• In the musical adaptation of The Toxic Avenger, the town bullies Bozo and Sluggo give excuses for their bullying during the song "Get the Geek".
  Bozo: I was beat as a child!
  Sluggo: I was touched and defiled!
• In West Side Story The Jets playfully make a song, "Gee, Officer Krupke" out of this.
  My daddy beats my mommy
  My mommy clobbers me
  My grandpa is a commie
  My grandma pushes tea
  My sister wears a moustache
  My brother wears a dress
  Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
  • Or, in the alternate lyric from the stage play:
    My father is a bastard
    My ma's an SOB
    My grandpa's always plastered
    My grandma pushes tea
    My sister wears a moustache
    My brother wears a dress
    Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!

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