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| Don Fellows, Verona Barnes, Dorrie Kavanaugh, David Spielberg, Barton Heyman, Norman Bush, Conard Fowkes. (Photos: Martha Swope.) |
Gil (David Spielberg) is a young man, an average guy, who is
experiencing various personal difficulties at home and work. He volunteers to
be a paid participant in a sleep research lab where he is placed in a bed and
allowed to dream. As he sleeps his dreams come to life are enacted by him and
four Black and white actors who portray his dream figures.
Gil’s emotional, marital, sexual, and employment crises are
shown, none of them especially unusual. The doctors frequently wake him to pump
him with questions, most of them apparently innocuous. In one scene, a Black
mugger dreamed of by Gil forces him to strip, and Gil dances in the nude,
enjoying his liberation. At the end, playwright Jack Gelber leaves us with “The
implication . . . that man’s mind always remains basically unsusceptible to
precise investigation,” as Clive Barnes explained it.
What Michael Smith called a “soporific” work was not received
with open arms, Walter Kerr referring to its “portentous remarks . . . and
embarrassingly literal visual metaphors,” and Barnes to its having a “concept .
. . a great deal better than the play itself.”