Unconscious Delights:

August Strindberg's impressionistic Dream Play staged at the Loeb Experimental Theatre drew its audience into a dream world that sparkled with spontaneity.

Hans Canosa's direction created a play that moved and changed focus as often as our dreams do in one night. Canosa showed intelligence, insight and imagination in exploring classic psycho-analytic notions of dream sequencing, wish fulfillment and repression.

Bright spotlights are trained on the audience seated around the stage. On center stage, the daughter (Cara Polites) of the mythic Aryan god Indra sits on a cloud suspended from the ceiling. These foreshadow the plethora of contrasting, inconsistent and perplexing images that are thrown at us in rapid succession.

The first of these images involves countless voices from every conceivable corner of the auditorium chanting "Daughter, Daughter." The chant builds up to a feverish crescendo ending upon the entrance of Indra, the God of Heaven (Jonathan Weinberg). "How did you get here?", he asks, to which his innocent daughter replies, "I was carried on a cloud, but it seems to be falling." The "here" that Indra refers to is Earth, the "dark and heaviest world" whose "discontented, thankless" inhabitants speak a language Indra calls "complaint." Indra's daughter does not agree with her father's condemnation of the human race. "Don't say that!" she says, "voices also rise in prayer. Your judgment is too hard, Father." The benevolent daughter of the Gods descends to Earth to explore the misery of the "discontented."

Canosa has cast his characters well. It is in their smooth interaction and inspiring coordination that the play builds up momentum and exudes the spontainety of improvisational theatre.

Cara Polites, who plays the lead, lends admirable poise and sensitivity to a demanding role. As Indra's daughter, she is taken through myriad images in a dream, a voyage of revelation and discovery on Earth. Canosa uses skillful imagery to convey these scenes. Brightly colored cloths are used repeatedly in stark contrast to the darkness that fills the dream world of the Ex. They portray flowers, knowledge, shelter... Canosa sketches one vivid, transient image after another.

The strength of the play lies in Canosa's portrayal of these superficial images of Earthly life and suffering as a dream. Throughout the forty minutes of the play, the overwhelming feeling is one of unreality, as though one were indeed sharing in the dream that Strindberg created. Chaotic, rapid, conflicting and often esoteric images are drawn upon by Canosa to convey this feeling of semiconsciousness.

The resolution comes only at the very end, when Indra's daughter reveals the divine wisdom. Man and life and the world are but mirages; living is a cloud that obfuscates the greatest suffering of all--love. Only in that realization lies redemption.

The stage is used imaginatively: there are scenes in which people hang upside down from the ceiling and in which Indra breaks through a whole segment of the audience as he barges in through the door that contains the mysteries of life. Superior coordination between the stage hands and the actors make for wonderful viewing and superb production (Emily Brodsky). In the end, though, it is Canosa who steals the show. His ingenuity, resourcefulness and vision are what make Dream Play a dream.