I saw a remount of the original production of John Patrick Shanley's The Dreamer Examines His Pillow back in New York when attending the National Shakespeare Conservatory. That was in the 1980s. I recall it vividly to this day.
The current production at the Odyssey Theatre is the better production. It tells an intense, vision-laden tale of a moment of crisis in three people's ultimately entwined lives. Tommy (James Liddell) is a mess, living in a rancid New York almost-apartment (probably a studio, certainly roach-infested), doing things he doesn't understand and trying to somehow get his life back in control. He's not a drug addict or anything like that. But he is, by any definition, a mess.
Enter Donna (Pamela Portnoy), his ex-girlfriend. We pretty soon figure out their breakup occurred as part of Tommy's spiral. She has heard he's been seeing her sister! And he admits he has. The longer the scene goes the more we realize Tommy's problem is somehow existential in nature, he having little or zero notion why he's acting the way he is. More, no matter what either one of them says, he and Donna are not in any way over. Both continue to dream about each other. Both daydream about touching each other, about feeling the others' skin.
This gets a lot more graphic (and poetic) than my words suggest here.
Donna in particular quietly but deeply freaks out when she sees Tommy has tried to paint a self portrait. It is terrible (and he admits it). But...Donna's father is an artist.
She leaves to talk to her father, with whom she almost never talks.
Her father (we never learn his name but he's played by Eric Larson) is sitting alone, drinking in his big house, having sold almost all his own paintings. When Donna shows up, he groans. But...he talks to her. He answers her questions. More, when he talks he tells the truth. Make that The Truth. As he sees it. Gloves off. This in fact may be one of the most vivid facts about this three-character play. All three tell unpadded, un-masked, unvarnished truth to each other. Donna bluntly tells Dad the basics of the messed-up basics of what she has with Tommy, but says she can handle all that. Until...Tommy began to act even a little bit like Dad, and her in turn like her mother. Her own crap is her responsibility, and she accepts it. But is it hers? Or is she simply reliving her mother's life and mistakes?
Revelations follow. Some really raw and powerful ones, especially about desire and sex, about identity and how people are stupid yet try to be wise, sometimes eventually achieving it in bits and drops. For the first time, Donna begins to actually know her father, understand him. It rocks her world. Just as her questions make him say things about himself he doesn't like but must face.
The final scene is when Dad goes to meet Tommy. It, like all the others, threads a series of very tiny needles of language about things, real things. Without being in verse, the whole play is in many ways poetry--heightened language to dive deep into who we really are, what we want, our glories and despairs, the stuff of passion. All in the mouths of hardbitten, profane New Yorkers sans any sentimentality or much refinement, yet full of blunt nuance. In particular the cast do the most fundamental thing needed in any play, but especially one where people talk about Truth--they know exactly what they are saying, and say it. Every word. That sounds easy, but is not. Not on stage, nor for that matter off of it.
So massive kudos to the cast, and to director Anne Kathryn Parma (when the entire cast is so good in such a consistent way, that is rarely an accident). Shanley qualifies as a major American playwright, and this story remains one of the reasons why. This production did it justice!
The Dreamer Examines His Pillow plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 1 p.m. until February 26, 2023 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025. It runs approximately 75 minutes without an intermission.
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