Theatre Review: A Dream Play @ Wellington Street Theatre, until Sunday
The former church and Masonic Temple on the corner of Johnson and Wellington streets has gone through another transformation: upon entering the old chapel, a patchwork of fabric dangles in front of you from a maze of pipes above the stage. The ominous spectre of the old organ looms in the backdrop until the lights dim and organ music floods the room.
From the first scene to the last, actors, technical crew and set designers successfully transform the old church into a visual extension of the human subconscious—the perfect landing pad for a deity to discover the nature of human existence. Single Thread Theatre Company presents a perplexing but compelling performance of Caryl Churchill’s version of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play.
Responsible for productions such as Henry V and Fen, Single Thread Theatre Company continues their legacy with A Dream Play, overcoming technical and logistical challenges to create a world that does justice to the complex script.
Fascinated by human adversity, Agnes (Allie Dunbar), daughter of the Vedic god Indra, descends to earth to witness life in its unadulterated form. In this unstable reality, outside of linear time or space, she encounters many forms of human suffering and happiness. Agnes falls prey to bad decisions and encounters some 40 characters who help her gain an authentic education in the human condition.
The script uses a hypnotic and lyrical colletion of words to express these complexities.
Set designer Conor Moore interprets the play’s strange atmosphere with a technically complex and visually stunning set. Until the lights dim, the purpose of what looks like a series of veils slung from a cage remains a mystery. When the show begins, you realize the set’s effectiveness as Agnes emerges from brightly illuminated gossamer on the stage.
As the play continues, the actors shift the lengths of fabric into different positions to mark scene changes. This directs the actors’ movement, creates isolated environments on stage and maintains audience interest. The result is surreal movement of characters and location evoking a dream-like state.
The use of sound also helps to draw the audience into the characters’ world. When a character hears dripping water, so does the audience, and the screams of the dying send chills up your spine.
Although visually pleasing, the frequent set changes are disorienting at first. The audience is forced to adjust to another setting before getting comfortable with the previous one. In addition, the small cast of 10 must play multiple roles to cover the many characters in the script. Until the audience becomes accustomed to the play’s dream logic, this tactic is confusing and makes it difficult to distinguish between characters.
After the performance, director Mary Fraser said the initial sensation of confusion is exactly what the play tries to achieve.
“We worked with the idea that in a dream, things don’t always have a logical connection, so you don’t have to make a logical connection with everything that happens,” she said.
Although hard to differentiate at first, the characters become more easily defined through the actors’ clear personality changes, which are executed obviously but without insulting the audience’s intelligence.
In addition, Dunbar works with the demanding script and does an excellent job separating her relationships with different characters. Because the balance doesn’t follow linear chronology, Dunbar must overlap different relationships at the same time. This becomes a challenge since each respective relationship represents polar emotional periods. Without treating them in the same way, she successfully switches from one lover to the next genuinely and naturally. In addition, Dunbar succeeds in portraying the wide spectrum of emotion presented to her in the script.
Overall, A Dream Play is technically stunning. However, no play would be complete without actors to substantiate the technological magic, and the cast does an excellent job of keeping the play’s emotional content grounded without overacting.
Although faced with a challenging script and a small cast, Single Thread Theatre Company pulls off this production in a way that reminds one of the perplexing nature of life and the moments between sleep and wakefulness. In the end, the play’s initial complexity becomes its greatest asset—capturing the essence of dream logic, it also represents the confusing nature of human existence.
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