The Dreamer Examines His Pillow
Opening Night: July 25, 2015
Closing: August 15, 2015
Theater: The Flea Theater
Written by Pulitzer Award and Tony Award-winning playwright, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and theatre and film director John Patrick Shanley, the dreamer examines his pillow examines one couple’s attempt to find their way through the maze of love, lust, and art. Through three scenes, we follow Tommy and Donna, passionate on-again/off-again lovers. When Donna turns to her emotionally distant father for advice, a charged conversation leads him to insist that he talk to Tommy . . . to get him to marry her, or beat him up . . . leading to a tenuous detente.
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August 3, 2015
In its current revival by the Attic Theater Company, “The Dreamer Examines His Pillow,”an early John Patrick Shanley work, is an intermissionless 90 minutes, but it’s really a play in three parts. From the audience’s perspective this particular production’s three parts are: “Not buying it,” “Just got more interesting” and, “Ah, now it all makes sense.” The play, at the Flea Theater, opens at the shabby apartment of Tommy (Shane Patrick Kearns), a 27-year-old who sometimes talks to his mini-fridge. In bursts Donna (Lauren Nicole Cipoletti), his former and maybe current girlfriend, who is blazing mad because Tommy has been fooling around with her 16-year-old sister. Donna is also irked by a self-portrait Tommy has painted, a wild-eyed thing that hangs on the wall. The two engage in a lengthy verbal sparring match, punctuated by lust and fueled by beer. Mr. Shanley has taken the old playwright’s license and put a lot of florid language into the mouths of low-class characters. And Mr. Kearns and Ms. Cipoletti aren’t really up to the challenge, too often sounding as if they’re just reciting lines, albeit at enthusiastically high volume.
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