The Dreamer Examines His Pillow 2023 (review)

 Spoilers ahoy!  

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.  

One Bad Day (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

One Bad Day is the latest total immersive theatre piece (by phone) by my friend Stepy Kamei (who played the title character in my adaptation of Carmilla: The Radio Play).  Her previous, about the great poet Sylvia Plath, was among my top ten of 2022.

This one contains another interesting premise behind it, but also a phone call with someone near the end of their life.  Someone who is now famous, sadly, for her death more than anything else.  More, it came at a startling time in American history.  Astronauts had landed on the Moon mere weeks earlier.  In the wake of what happened, the war in Vietnam became many times worse, followed by the Watergate Scandal which rocked American trust in our government to the foundations.

This person was Sharon Tate.

An actress of some talent, she appeared a variety of films including The Fearless Vampire Slayers and Valley of the Dolls.  She married Roman Polanski and they were expecting a child together when members of a cult called "The Family" headed by Charles Manson broke into their Benedict Canyon home and killed everyone there (except for a caretaker who was in the guest house, and heard nothing).  It was a shocking, horrific crime followed by others.  The investigation and trial can be read about in the non fiction book Helter Skelter and at least two different films more or less based on it.

But this experience focuses on Tate, on this very optimistic and happy person, someone charming and kind and generous.  Kamei brings this person to life, not in a cloying sort of hallmark movie way, but simply as a person who was like that.  A breath of emotional fresh air amid cynicism.  She was someone I wanted to spend more time with, an anodyne against angst and despair.

But of course, I also knew what was going to happen to her.  And that was horrible.

I was actually alive when these events happened, but was a child.  For me, it was very much like a trip back in time.  And it felt like exactly that, to the point where I felt shaken at the end, and more than a bit disturbed--a fine a testimony to the power of a performance as one could ask for.

One Bad Day is part of Nothing in the Dark Productions, As of this writing there are still performances scheduled for Jan 25 through 27, January 31 through February 3, and February 7 through February 10, 2023.

Top Ten 2022

 

Always a difficult list to put together.  Always.  I struggled, as ever, no least because of my rule that no one theatre gets more than a single listing on this per year.  Plus I wanted to add at least two or three more plays.  Some of the criteria are quality of performance and production, but also my view of the scripts.  

So here it is.  In no particular order...

• The Rage Fairy from Ballview Entertainment was one of the amazing, surreal pieces of theatre I've ever witnessed.  Imagine if you will an apocalyptic version of Alice in Wonderland with a feminist lens.  
• Metamorphoses from The Noise Within, a glorious retelling/re-imagination of Greek myth told with startling power, which moved me very deeply.  I myself hold theatre is the correct medium with which to tell myth.  In fact, I think LOTR should have been a cycle of plays not a trilogy of movies!  This production demonstrates why.
• End Game from CityGarage, as ever a difficult choice because this theatre company does amazing shows all the time.  I will only do one production from any one company for this list in a given year so I had to choose--and this one remained the strongest on offer, by a hair.  This weird dreamlike meditation about endings might simply have resonated more because I'm in my sixties.
• We Should Meet in Air from Stepy Kamei, a friend of mine, startled me at the power of it, a seeming phone call to me from Sylvia Plath.  That is all it was.  Yet it was wonderful, and I was totally sucked in, and the knowledge I had this was on Sylvia's last birthday hit me in the end like a gut punch.  Immersive theatre at its most intense.
• Asexuality! The Solo Musical from the Hollywood Fringe Festival is a one person musical which of all things should not work (rarely does) but in this case is a tour de force, complete with a glorious open ending--which of course is not really an ending because there really isn't any such thing, is there?
• Rapunzel Alone from the 24th Street Theatre marks a powerful re-telling of a fairy tale in almost grimly realistic terms during WWII, yet with puppets and gentle, fierce power.
• The Unsackable Man from ZJU combines something I love--Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the nearest thing the USA has to an Illiad or Mahabarata--with something I loathe, i.e. professional football.  The result shouldn't work.  It does.  OMG it does to a degree and in ways beyond anything I would have imagined, up to and including all the nuances of the original in the end.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream from the Open Fist proves what a startling amount of interpretation lies even in some of Shakespeare's "lightest" texts.  To be sure, this is also one of his best (there are some clunkers, to be honest) but this production asks a simple but profound question which gives a fascinating new context--namely, whose dream is this?
• Battlesong of Boudica from School of Night, one of the most fantastical and utterly theatrical offers an actual historical/mythological ritual enacted with masks and dance and puppets and drums--complete with a single mistake by the title character which changes the outcome.  One little error.  But mostly, this is a tale of rage kindled by a lack of honor, humility, kindness, or anything really save greed, arrogance, and fear.  Topical, don't you think?
• The Children at the Fountain takes place just a few years from now, and deals with consequences, with courage taken to the highest and most beautiful (horrible) level.  And handful of people, in one little house, make a choice.  A series of choices.  I'm a huge believer in how the intimate and individual is what what shapes the collective and the grand.  This demonstrates that.  And broke my heart.  

The Many Lives of Abigail Season (review)

 Spoilers ahoy! 

Having enjoyed previous shows by Ballview Entertainment so much, I naturally enough looked forward to The Many Lives of Abigail Season.  As per usual, what I did not do was try to find out much about the content.  Fewer expectations mean I can allow myself to more thoroughly enjoy what a performance is trying to be.

But this is a review, so you want to know that.  Here is my take:  A noir mystery about a missing person entwining the adult film industry and high level string theory in quantum physics.  Plus, you know, a pair of kid detectives.  Same old, same old.

I mentioned this description to some friends and their reaction was a "Hell yes, I want to see that!"  

Which makes plenty of sense.  Words like zany, complex, mind-blowing, madcap, tragic all come to mind having seen this eighty-minute performance.  Meg Colburn directed this play by Max Zumstein, centered around Mark Darling (Ty Aldridge) whose wife Abigail (Jenna Hogan) vanished without a trace months back.  When he sees her in an adult movie--a scene not as graphic as it might sound, but somehow more disturbing--he ends up hiring kid detectives Mason (Lauren Adlhoch) and Stone (David Dickens) to try to find her.  I would argue this set-up alone veers into the wonderfully bizarre.  Pretty soon, in between scenes of the investigation we see Abigail in other lives--a nun, a business exec, a maybe secret agent.  Along the way we also meet a cascade of wild characters including an effete but honorless private detective (Sean Alan Mazur), a brilliant physicist turned porn star (Sika Lonner), another porn star who seems to have become some kind of aspiring Boddisatva (Ian Michaels) plus two sets of what appear to be a brother and sister (Liz Mina and author Zumstein) who form a pair of truly wild duos, and a publicist AND her secretary (Antonia Czinger).  Without an intermission, the plot and emotional roller coaster never really slows down very much.  

What makes this work ultimately is that the people seem in some sense real, at least in terms of this weird world.  We recognize them, even if they are weird.  After all, haven't we all wished we could just be hired to have fun and become a star?  Or had our personal interests and obsessions prove true, important, and feasible?

The character of Mark Darling in particular seems vividly "us" in some way.  He's in many ways the most ordinary of characters.  Not least is the fact he's unhappy, alone, yearning for a love he no longer has in a world that makes no emotional sense to him.  At all.  He's the point of the spear when it comes to the whole quest of the plot--and in the end he does survive, does end up enough for most the challenges he faces.  If in the end he doesn't get all he longs for, we can hardly deny he's become stronger, even wiser.

The Many Lives of Abigail Season plays Wednesday Dec. 14, Friday Dec. 16, and Saturday Dec. 17 at 8:30pm with a matinee at 4pm on Saturday Dec. 17 at the Whitmore Lindley Theatre Center 11006 Magnolia Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 91601.