LONG NIGHTS (WITH DREAMS OF FALLING)
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Ray Pride’s Long Nights (With Dreams of Falling), now playing as part of Prop Theatre’s “Late Night” series, is emblematic of this quandary. Significantly, Pride doesn’t focus on the details of the tempestuous situation at the center of his play but on the passions and consequences that situation provokes. We never really know why Helen (Dado) and Johnny (Andy Rothenberg), Pride’s two protagonists, are always fighting, but we identify, however embarrassed we may be about it, with the obsessiveness of their love affair. “I wanted to be sure it was attraction . . . and not distraction,” Johnny says early on. “That it was pheromones, not hormones. One’s the one that says this is the one for you. But hormones say any woman will do.”
Within seconds of meeting Helen, Johnny’s completely sucked in. “I had to know the rest of her,” he says. “I couldn’t map her, I couldn’t just know every tic and gesture and curve by sight–I had to make myself whole by learning all of her. And that meant sex. And love. And maybe children. And certainly marriage.” Helen’s got the fever too, but she’s less sentimental. She knows Johnny has mistaken excitement for commitment. She knows at least part of the dynamic between them is that he wants her, and that makes him doubly attractive to her. But when he tells her he loves her, she can’t handle it at all.
