From the archives: November, 2007 - Piven's 'What Dreams May Come'

October 29, 6:57 PMChicago Theatre Review ExaminerCatey Sullivan

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This review was originally published in November, 2007 in Pioneer Press Newspapers.

Roughly 20 minutes into Joyce Piven and Stephen Fedo’s flat and disconnected adaptation of Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the heroine/narrator jumps up on a chair and, in the verbal equivalent of hair-rending, beseeches her parents- to-be not to get married: "Nothing good will come of it,” she wails, “Only remorse, hatred, scandal and two children whose characters are monstrous!" It’s a Cassandra-worthy moment of foreboding histrionics. It’s also devoid of meaningful context. Why is the marriage so doomed? What makes this narrator, one of the union’s children, “monstrous”? We never find out. The wild-eyed scenery-gnashing comes amid a re-enactment of an unremarkable courtship; how an afternoon at Coney Island led to accursed offspring is anyone’s guess.

That scene is indicative of one of two fundamental problems with Piven  Theatre’s What Dreams May Come: American Visions Through Jewish Eyes” The piece’s three, short stories (adapted by Piven and Fedo and directed by Piven) don’t provide the vision the title promises, only clunky narrative and half-formed characters. Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” Bernard Malamud ‘s The Silver Crown and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Wedding in Brownsville come a cross not as jewels of evocative literature but as shrugging so-what fragments of lives presented with all the vivacity of museum dioramas. If there’s subtext linking the trio of stories, it’s unclear. As for the meaning layered into plots, it’s obscured.

In each story, actors narrate the action as it plays out (“It is Sunday, July 12, 1909 and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn. ”), and perform as characters in the narration (“I feet as if I were in a motion picture theater.”) And that’s the second fundamental problem here. It’s not a style that allows the audience to become immersed in the action of any of the stories – we’re constantly being jarred by the likes of”he said” and “she said” and “then we did this.”

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities is the most problematic, as Del (Ravi Batista, emoting as if she wandered in from the final scene of “Suddenly Last Summer”) begins the story at a fever-pitch intensity. Start out giving breathless, life-and-death import to descriptions of shade trees, and there’s just there’s not a whole lot of room to maneuver as the story progresses to matters more inherently dramatic than foliage.

The Silver Crown works better structurally – at least there’s an arc to it - but Malamud’s delicate mix of mystical possibility and angular skepticism don’t merge well here. What’s more fascinating than anything on stage is the tale’s source material, a 1971 New York Times article about a rabbi indicted for selling Cabbalistic faith healing rituals he never performed. But intrigue of the faded clipping doesn’t’ translate in Piven and Fedo’s pedestrian adaptation or in the stock, shambling performance of Bernard Beck as the rabbi who could be either a shamanistic holy man or an ace con artist.

The final piece is A Wedding in Brownsville, a ghostly story of life-long yearning. Little of the rich, cross- cultural riotousness of the title celebration in Singer’s haunting romance endures the journey from page to stage. Moreover, the onstage love story between a man and a woman roughly 40 years his junior plays more awkwardly than romantically.

In all, the stories of Visions are better served in their original format.