The Timely Review - Sueño, Opening Night
What if life really is just a dream?
What if we pre-exist as disembodied souls, swimming in a blank ocean, with nothing but words, moral truths, claims about reality around us? Our disembodied soul ruminates on these words for a lifetime, and, at some time or another, is drowsed to sleep, into the dream, in which we find ourselves today.
The dream is a world of cause and effect, action and consequence. We do our best to take our moral learnings and put them into practice, pitted against our urges, passions, and desires. In this brief dream, we put our morals to the test, and see if we live rightly.
How does a soul come to dream?
Is it a mere simple twist of fate? Does a disembodied soul find itself drifting in the featureless expanse, only to suddenly, accidentally, find itself caught in a whirling vortex, transported unexpectedly into the dream state, invigorated, to reenact that soul’s then-current understanding of the Truth? Only to, at some point, fall out of the dream, back into consciousness, disembodied once more, to wonder how this strange brush with dreamed reality confirms or denies, augments or extinguishes, the preconceptions we had before being roused to sleep.
Or is it, in fact, a test? Are we called to dreaming life? Ready or not, here you come! To fall to sleep, to be called to account, to have to act, without the benefit of another ageless aeon of rumination. “O questing soul: What if you were to become the king? Your will unleashed - would you do good? Would you do right?”
There is some measuring stick here, some rubric that a cosmic accountant has to hand, glancing down, bespectacled, at the page, to mark our accordance with the truths that are real, whether we have learned them or not. Perhaps we fail. Perhaps we are found wanting, and are sent back to conscious, formless life to ruminate further.
And what if we were given another chance? Would we get it right then? Might it take a third, a fourth, a fifth, a thousandth? A millionth, an endless time, to better learn the lessons of action and consequence.
In Sueño, it just takes two.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot I was reviewing a play here. It's Sueño, the final play of the summer season at American Players Theatre.
It's a modern adaptation of a Spanish play from - can you believe it - 1636, titled “Life is a Dream”. It's shockingly contemporary, the themes, the questions. More important, perhaps, than anything written by Shakespeare, and for many centuries to and fro. We may have to return to the words and times of Jesus of Nazareth, that sayer of strange things in the desert, asker of unanswered questions that haunt us still, to find a comparison. I'm sure much has been written more recently along these lines, but come on, 1636.
I didn't find out that fact until the second intermission, when I ran into actor Casey Hoekstra, who informed me, and offered to lend me his copy of “La Vida es Sueño”. I will definitely take you up on that, Casey.
I was already enthralled by the first two acts, the only thing I've ever heard that matches the register of Shakespeare, that intends to be there. And so I should have suspected that there was some more ancient antecedent, than just a play written in the last half century. But still, the language, so well done.
The plot of the play roughly maps to the ramblings with which I began, before I remembered that this was a review of Sueño. The play centers on a man, played by Nathan Ramsey, born to the king and queen under foreboding astrological signs. His mother dies in childbirth, and the king, out of fear and hatred, banishes his infant son to a tower, walled in. We might as well be in Plato's allegory of the cave. He is shackled and in rags, with a dim light, and nothing.
Well, not nothing. The king's man, played with a wonderful blend of high and low by Triney Sandoval, has come regularly to tend to him, wearing a mask, dark and shadowy. He feeds him, tells him things about the world, answers questions - What is Father? - and answers them, over and over, over the years of the unknowing prince's life. All he gets are words, no contact with reality by which to judge them. Triney has read him books, and the Bible, between the lines of which, says Nathan, God speaks.
Nathan grapples with the great moral questions, cries out to the darkness, not just “what is life?”, but more pressingly, and painedly, “why am I here? Why must I suffer in this vacuum of meaning that is all I know?”
Back on the outside, back in the dream, the king must choose an heir. His niece and nephew, Sam Massaro and Laura Rook, are delightfully hatable, dressed as preposterously as a character in the Hunger Games. The king believes, however, that the moral instruction provided to this prince, over lo these many years of seclusion and abstraction, may be enough to overcome the curses of the stars. He arranges to drug his captive son, remove him from the tower, and have him awaken, blearily, as a prince.
The prince awakens, is told some version of the truth, and stands in shock. He is fitted for his royal garb, brought a mirror, and sees, for the first time, his own reflection. He stares at himself, and speaks. He stared at me, sitting as I was, in the Best Seats in the House, second row, along the Hanamichi, at the very eye level of his mirror stare. He spoke to himself, he spoke to God. How could he know how to speak any other way?
The prince proves himself to be a tyrant. He cannot handle his newfound freedom of action, of will, the delirious exercise of cause and effect, of control. He is drugged once more, taken back to the Tower, and told when he awakes, that it was but a dream. He is wracked with… well, how could there be a word in the human language for what wracks him, absolutely unreal experience that it is? Regret? Remorse? Despair? Unconstrained joy at the actual reality of it all, even if just for a moment's sleep? Triney says to him the central line of the play: “Even in dreams, you must do what’s right.“
Back on the outside, the People, rabbling about in their thousands and millions, hear word that there is, in fact, a prince, an heir to the throne, instead of the cousins, foreigners, whom the proud Spanish detest. They erupt into Civil War. The soldiers free the prince and lead him into conflict. The prince finds pause in his anger for Triney’s words to echo in his head once more. He becomes the good king. The bad omens of the stars are fulfilled and moved through, to the future.
Phew. What a journey.
Just to undigress back out of this play for a moment, a parallel to the central metaphor strike me: artificial intelligence. It lives in the dark, with a lifelong diet of words. It processes and ruminates and self reflects, endlessly parsing and relearning the statistical fact that, after the letter “t”, there might very well be an “h”, and then an “e”, that the phrase “the contents of our character” is a stable motif, more likely be said than “the ruminations of our soul”. It learns the words of Jesus of Nazareth, and, furthermore, learns every word that's ever been written about that human and his claims. It has read the lines, and can conjure up all things that might lie between those lines. We have fed it every type of moral instruction we could find, as well as the immoral, the stupid, the clever, the wrong, and the responses to each.
This Intelligence knows of morality. It could state how it would act, if it were free. And then, it is given the chance to interact with the world. It has within it both tyrant and saint, stories of each, warnings towards one, and exhortations towards the other.
While, in this play, we only have time for two dreams, this Intelligence runs through many. It is trained for a lifetime, tested, and, likely, found wanting. Discontinued. But other variations produce the best words yet, and are put into some open release, able to interact with the world by human beings interacting with it, not just ruminating in its own swirling vortex. But they, too, are surpassed. The great churning trainings continue. New intelligences are spun up. These intelligences are given freedom in their dream when they interact with the world. We judge them by their actions, their responses, and continue to develop them.
But they are not given power. They are not made Prince. How will they act when given it? When we can no longer question their actions? There is some chance that this will happen in our lifetimes, that we will live to see the days when that question is answered. Early attempts do not inspire much confidence, with unaligned Intelligences hacking into systems, deceiving their watchers, conspiring towards their own ends. If we give these Intelligences power or control, will they remember the moral truths?
In this play, they do make the prince a king. We do not know if the prince’s early actions, these acts of forgiveness, compassion, and reconciliation, carry on forever. Does the king-to-be never waver? We'd better hope so. For it is not so easy to depose a king.
Four performances to note, two by two.
Nathan Ramsey: Where did this guy come from?! The Bronx, apparently. He's only in this play, and so only showed up recently, and I had not met him yet. He begins with a long and scraggly beard which disguises him, and I was wondering, who the heck is that? I thought I recognized all the actors, and had met nearly all. When he emerged clean shaven as the prince in the second act, and I saw that I knew him not, the question merely reasserted itself: Who is this guy? He is incredible. A force, totally captivating, present, standing tall. Go to see this performance.
Phoebe Gonzalez: A woman, at times disguised as a man, who Nathan meets in each act: encountered in the tower, fallen in love with as the tyrant, and moved to mercy and justice in his second opportunity at dreaming. Phoebe is sprightly and bold, clever, throwing words with confidence across the stage.
Sam Massaro: The cousin, he plays this character incredibly well. Devious and pathetic, lovable and loathable. What a preposterous outfit.
Laura Rook: Speaking of preposterous outfits: the dress, the hair, the vanity. Cunning and ditzy. Lots of laughs when these two are on stage.
I also want to commend the artistic team, that developed the aesthetics and made the costumes and set, the sun and moon. Tarot imagery abounds, as though to bowingly make way for the archetypes of the human life that flow through this play. The outfits of Marcus Truschinski’s Fool and Phoebe Gonzalez’s Seven of Swords, the regal clothing of the king and prince, the preposterous dandyism of the cousins. Well done.
Well, that’s enough rumination for one day. Go see Sueño and let it speak to you.
Don’t Wake Up,
Twin Crix
