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ABOUT A DREAM PLAY: "Human beings are to be pitied." This is the refrain heard throughout Strindberg's "Dream Play". Written in 1901, the play was thought impossible to stage due to its surrealist structure. Anything can happen, anywhere, and it does. The pretext of the story is that the Daughter of Heaven comes down to live amongst mankind in order to judge their sufferings firsthand. It is full of familiar iconography and archetypal characters. While keeping Strindberg's text unchanged, we superimposed a veneer of 20th century iconography (from Marilyn Monroe to Joe DiMaggio; the view from LAX to Graumann's Chinese Theater) onto a plot that functioned like many independent shrines (examples of human suffering), encircling a great pagoda (the Daughter of Heaven's judgment of mankind). It is a play made of hundreds of moments of understanding. One thing is understood, and then its opposite is understood, warp and woof, weaving a metaphysical tapestry. Heaven's daughter collects hundreds of these threads, these epiphanies. And when she is done, the play simply stops. In order to make such a messianic text work for an audience, one must approach the entire performance as more of a prayer, than a play. It is a mantra, repeated over and over again, until one's sense of compassion is awakened. |