THE DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW
Tommy (David Atkinson) is an unshaven, slack-jawed wastrel of 27 who lounges around in rump-sprung jeans contemplating his self-portrait. Donna (Joan Jurige) is a similarly untidy young woman who wears crumpled cocktail dresses with slippers and no stockings. The play begins with Donna storming into Tommy’s flea-trap apartment. She’s mad at him for flirting with her 16-year-old sister and wants him to stop. She rages on for a while about Tommy’s slovenly surroundings, his lack of ambition and artistic talent, his cruelty at leaving her and hitting on her sister, and so on and so on. Then she kisses him passionately and says she loves him. Tommy loves her too, but gee, he just doesn’t know what he wants. After they both discourse at length about their ambivalence, Donna announces that she’s going to get her father. She leaves, Tommy starts to get himself another beer–and has a vision. This vision involves some vaguely Dantean imagery–swimming through boiling water, reaching into black holes. The light that Tommy sees appears to be the one in the refrigerator, which makes his description of the vision rather hard for us to hear.
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Shanley doesn’t make his argument any more convincing by the speeches he puts in the characters’ mouths. When Donna wants to say Tommy’s good in the sack, she doesn’t say that but: “I am an ocean with a thousand stars reflected in it. . . . My eyes are like two black pools of water.” To tell Tommy he’s messed up, she says, “You talk about yourself like you were an isotope–unstable to the max.” Pretty highfalutin for someone who also says, “That kind of shit drives me totally insane.” The actors are obviously trying to twist their midwestern speech around a script written for a New York dialect–which makes lines like “Dis world is comin’ at me like chaotic myaadness” even more grotesque. And the overgenerous and inept scattering of “fuckin’” throughout, coupled with the scarcity of other profanities, pegs Shanley as one of the most tone-deaf cussers in the history of the English language. To paraphrase Mark Twain, he’s got the words–one word, anyway–but not the music.
