FIGHTER OF A FITFUL DREAM
Knowing all this, one might expect SST’s plays to be either didactic staged lectures or feel-good mush. But Fighter of a Fitful Dream, which expands SST’s thematic focus by addressing the topics of unemployment and marital breakup, is neither of those things. Harking back to the social and psychological explorations of Ibsen on the one hand and Strindberg on the other, it’s a rather surprising mix of naturalistic drama and expressionistic dream theater. And though it doesn’t always work, it’s offbeat and provocative enough to be more interesting–as well as more relevant to its audiences’ lives–than a lot of more assured professional theater.
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Roger Treacle is a 38-year-old middle-management type whose company is “rightsizing” itself. Roger has participated in the restructuring by helping decide which of his longtime colleagues will be laid off; now Roger himself has been restructured right out of a job. He arrives home, unable at first to tell his wife Fyaed the news, only to be confronted with another problem: his and Fyaed’s 18-year-old daughter, a freshman at college, has called to say she was assaulted and wants to come home.
Fighter of a Fitful Dream concludes with a woman closing a door (shades of A Doll’s House) and the long-suppressed cry of a man who’s made a lifetime habit of holding his feelings in. No answers, no sure solutions, just a long-overdue confrontation, the ending of a lie, and the beginning of some new lives.
