MR+Life+Is+a+Dream

Maddie Ross 10/17/2011 Waking Up: A Performance Critique of //Life Is a Dream// After seeing the posters plastered around the Fine Arts building and the rest of campus, I was sure I would walk out of Marla Carlson’s //Life Is a Dream// thinking, “Why did my Dr. Richmond make me such a dramatic and depressing play? Now all I want to do is throw myself at the cars speeding by on Lumpkin from all the sadness of the performance.” But instead I was very pleasantly surprised. Although I was thoroughly confused as to what was happening in the first half an hour of //Life Is a Dream//, I emerged from the theatre reveling in the themes and complexity. //Life Is a Dream// captures the silliness and seriousness of one underlying theme: our peers can condition us to questioning our reality. What is real life and what is a dream?

The entire performance of //Life Is a Dream// is based on two scenarios, with one unraveling inside the other. The first revolves around a team of entrepreneurs persuading a group of co-workers from a large corporation, including their CEO, to buy and take part in a new age virtual reality invention. This “invention” is nothing but a box made of wood, painted black. But the characters pretend they have entered into an alternate storybook reality. Most of the play is played out through this scenario, where the corporation clients take on new personalities and a whole new story with kings and dukes and princesses is depicted. In this storyline, the main character, Segismundo, is tricked into thinking a major event in his life, learning he is a prince, is a dream. This is the first example of a character being pressured into changing his concept of reality. The second example of this corruption, a much more large-scale corruption, is the office group’s voluntary participation in childish pretend play. In the end, the co-workers admit that they never really saw anything different; they just assumed that everyone else saw something amazing, so they played along. The entrepreneurs laugh off the stage with a big fat check from the company. Essentially, the entrepreneurs provided the corporation with nothing but some heightened imagination, and made off with a fact chunk of change. The co-worker’s easy willingness to play along shows how quick and excited they were to assimilate with their peers. No character wanted to be left out of the pretend experiment, fearing the others would find them strange for not understanding or interacting with the “new-age technology”. As a result, all the actors are running around the stage, screaming and sword fighting with each other. The effect is quite comical, and even the character’s end up enjoying their play and laugh at themselves. But the laugh is shaky, for they realize their realities have been altered, and as they truly believed they were transported to another place, when in fact they never left the stage. For the hour and a half, their lives were a dream. And as the audience gets sucked into the action, our lives for those 90 minutes were nothing but a dream.

Throughout //Life Is a Dream//, the acting was consistently strong. Each actor stayed in character, which was particularly difficult because each actor took on two roles, the role in the “real world” and the “dream world”. One main character screams that her name is “Erin!” and not “Rosaura”, her dream name. The actors were succeeded in contrasting these two opposite personas. Yet for some actors, their two characters overlapped each other. The clown character provided the comedic relief in the “real world” and “dream world” as the somewhat pathetic and overlooked tongue-tied fool. Yet other actors had no similarities between their characters. The two main characters, Segismundo and Rosaura, barely said as their “real world” characters. Segismundo was actually simply lifted from the audience. I found this an odd introduction of a character. She had nothing to do with the corporative group, no one to impress or be judged by. Yet she still played along with them. I wish she had been a member from the office group from the beginning. I also wish that she had been male. The gender crossing of most roles was almost unnoticeable, and I liked how ambiguous the characters could be portrayed. The young women who played Segismundo was undeniably powerful and commanding, and truly phenomenal in what she could portray. But her curvy body and small stature made it hard to believe that other men would so roughly push her around; surely a burly man would treat such a womanly frame with more sensitivity and tenderness. I can’t imagine a man playing the part more realistically or with more macho bravado, but I would have liked her physical appearance to match the volume of her acting.

Not only did the performers have to be phenomenal actors, they also had to be able to sing, and on a more extreme scale, dance. The singing was utterly flawless. It was obvious that the singing soloists had great voices and some vocal training. The dancing, on the other hand, I found to be a bit distracting. The choreography was very strategically thought out and fit the rise and fall of the plot action, but the actors were not dancers. A trained eye might only catch their mistakes, but I could tell when a foot as out of line or an arm was not fully extended. These minor, yet multiple mistakes distracted me from the story line. I would miss certain lines because I was focused on the misdirected movement of an actor. Yet, for being non-dancers, I appreciate how hard these performers worked to learn the intricate choreography. They had to absorb more than steps, but basic technique, something that does not come naturally. Overall, the movement highlighted the dramatic nature of the performance, and I’m glad it was incorporated.

One more aspect completed the performance piece; one element of decoration contradicted the grey-clad actors, bare stage, and simple unchanging bright lighting. This element was the combination of costumes and props. Simple colorful skirts and vests were used to identify players in the “dream world”. They carried and fought with colorful foam swords. Both costume and prop looked like toys, like props a child would use to “play pretend”. At first I didn’t like how childish and unrealistic these outfits and swords looked. But as the play carried on, I realized why the director chose these obviously fake weapons and garments. The fact that the swords were made of foam and the clothing was used for elementary school recess emphasized how the characters became so involved with the “dream world”. They looked rather ridiculous, threatening each other with foam and prancing around in shiny vests, but they looked more ridiculous because they believed their costumes and props to be real. The entrepreneurs simply had to add some decoration to the play and the co-workers became even more involved, assimilated more into their “play” world. The “costumes” were good identifiers of who was male or female, because the gender roles overlapped. Men wore vests and women wore skirts. But I think the director could have taken the clothing as a tool of organization further. Each of the four entrepreneurs, including the two musicians that were lumped into their team, had a corresponding office member. In the story, the entrepreneur was a guardian to their partner, and coached them throughout the play. Because there were so many people onstage, I began to forget who the pairs were. The pairs should have worn watching colors, so the audience could easily identify who was working with whom. I think the director could have taken this even one step further and dressed the entrepreneurs and the corporate group with a differing detail, perhaps a trim on the corporate group’s vests and skirts that the entrepreneurs’ garments did not posses. This would have continually reminded the audience who is in control of the experiment and who is just playing along with the game.

Down in the Cellar theatre, I do feel that I got lost in another world, one outside of UGA, with weird complicated names that I couldn’t always follow, but I did fully grasp the themes of assimilation and how reality can be easily altered. Both themes are found in //Life Is a Dream// and throughout modern day life. After the show, neither my friend nor I spoke our opinions, too afraid that they would be different from the other one’s. Just like the characters in the play, we wanted to have the same reactions, even if we just pretended to have them. And as we exited the dark basement of the Fine Arts building to the outside world, it did feel like emerging from a dream. The cast and crew of //Life Is a Dream// really took us to another world that we could have simply dreamed up. I hope to revisit this other dimension of the UGA theatre department in more upcoming performances.