Category: Film & Art

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Dreams and Shakespeare: Othello

Shakespeare’s most cunning villain turns sleep and dreaming against his enemies.

At the center of Shakespeare’s dark tragedy is the cruel dynamic between Othello, a magnificent warrior and heroic leader, and Iago, his resentful subordinate. (In the current production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chris Butler performs in the title role, and Iago is played by Danforth Comins). Despite being a dark-skinned Moor, Othello has earned the trust of the white Christians of Venice because of his military valor and success in defending their city.  But Iago secretly hates Othello, and he launches a devilish plan to ruin, humiliate, and destroy him, all while pretending to be Othello’s most faithful servant.  A subtle weapon in Iago’s arsenal is his malicious manipulation of people’s perceptions of sleep, beds, and dreaming.

The play opens with an overwrought gentleman, Roderigo, furiously accusing Iago of betrayal.  Roderigo is in love with Desdemona (played in the OSF production by Alejandra Escalante), a Senator’s daughter, and he has been paying Iago for help in wooing her. Now comes the shocking news that Desdemona has already married Othello, and Roderigo demands to know how Iago could have let this happen.  These are Iago’s first words of the play:

“’Sblood, but you’ll not hear me. If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me.” (I.i.4-5)

Iago tells Roderigo his suspicions are no more credible than the fleeting whimsies of a dream.  He relies on a kind of proverbial phrasing that equates dreams with something as far as possible from the conscious mind.  He’s telling Roderigo: Not only did I not know about this, but it was not even in the furthest reaches of my awareness.

In fact, Iago did know about it, and he may well have dreamed about it, too (more on that below).  He already knows about Desdemona, and he already has a plan for using her against the Moor.  While he and Roderigo have been talking about their mutual hatred of Othello, Iago has been steering them through the dark nighttime streets of Venice, straight to the home of Desdemona and her family. Their yelling brings Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, to the window. Prodded by Iago, Roderigo informs the Senator that his daughter has secretly married Othello (Iago puts it in more inflammatory terms: “your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs” (I.i.115-116)).  Brabantio urgently calls for all the servants of his house to awaken, light candles, and search for his daughter.  For a moment he pauses to reflect:

“This accident is not unlike my dream, belief of it oppresses me already.” (I.i.141-142)

Iago slinks into the night before Brabantio confirms that Desdemona is missing, but his dastardly work is done.  Brabantio has awakened to his worst fear—the dishonoring of his daughter—and Iago has insured that all his paternalistic rage will be aimed straight at Othello.

It seems unlikely that Iago knew Brabantio was dreaming right before he awoke, but it certainly works to the villain’s advantage.  In a way, Iago both creates Brabantio’s dream and interprets it.  If he and Roderigo had not caused a noisy uproar, Brabantio would have kept sleeping, and might not have remembered this dream at all.  Once Brabantio is awake, if he had not been immediately confronted with the shocking news of his daughter’s betrayal, he might have associated the dream with something else in his life.  Although he seems slightly ambivalent about the dream’s relevance to the situation with his daughter (they are “not unlike”), it takes no time for the two to become fused emotionally in his mind (“it oppresses me already”).  This is just as Iago would want.  Iago has manipulated Brabantio into using the energies of his dreams to fuel his vendetta against Othello.

From Brabantio’s perspective, everything in the play turns out just as badly as he feared it would.  In that regard, his dream could be regarded as an accurate prophecy of the doomed future.  Even though he’s wrong about Desdemona’s virtue and integrity, he’s right about the danger to her posed by the Moor.  Iago is the interpretive agent of this realization, and he turns Brabantio’s insight into a weapon aimed straight at Othello’s heart.

Alas, the shot has no effect.  Brabantio cannot persuade the leaders of Venice to act against Othello, given their overriding need of his military protection, plus Desdemona’s sincere declarations of love for him.

Thus Iago must devise a new plan to destroy Othello.  In the final lines of Act I Iago is onstage alone, pondering the question “How? How?” In a burst of malevolent inspiration, he envisions an intricate plot using people’s fears and biases against them, all leading to a single violent end.  Iago revels in his own nightmarish brilliance:

“I have’t, it is engend’red: Hell and Night must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.” (I.iii.410-411)

Later, just before a key piece of action begins, Iago refers again to the nocturnal provenance of his plan:

“But here they come: if consequence do but approve my dream, my boat sails freely, both with wind and stream.” (II.iii.61-62)

He likens his scheme to a prophetic dream that predicts the future.  At one level this is quite ironic, since Iago is anything but superstitious.  His behavior reflects a pure form of willful, defiant individualism; he is determined to create his own chosen future, not wait passively for his fate.

But at another level this comment appears as an honest self-recognition of his unusual powers of imagination.  Iago’s “dream” is a detailed prediction about what will happen if certain people’s emotions are stimulated in specific ways and channeled towards certain other people.  He has set this dream in motion, and he can accurately foresee where it will lead.  He knows that Othello’s downfall will begin with the destruction of his sleep:

“Not Poppy, nor Mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou ow’dst yesterday.” (III.iii.320-323)

While he steals the sweet sleep of Othello, Iago adds bitter falsehoods to the sleep of the Moor’s top military assistant, Cassio.  To persuade Othello that Cassio has illicit desires for Desdemona, Iago tells the following story:

“I lay with Cassio lately, and being troubled with a raging tooth, I could not sleep. There are a kind of men so loose of soul that in their sleeps will mutter their affairs: one of this kind is Cassio. In sleep I heard him say, ‘Sweet Desdemona, let us be wary, let us hide our loves.’ And then, Sir, would he gripe, and wring my hand, cry ‘Oh sweet creature,’ and then kiss me hard, as if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots that grew upon my lips; laid his leg o’er my thigh, and sigh’d and kiss’d, and then cried, ‘Cursed fate, that gave thee to the Moor.’” (III.iii.403-415)

This story serves Iago’s cause in several ways.  Because of the nature of the circumstances (it’s night, they’re asleep), it cannot be checked or verified.  It appears to be a special, unguarded insight into Cassio’s true character, and it fits with other clues Iago has laid before the Moor.  It allows Iago to insert the most blatantly sexual and jealousy-stimulating images into Othello’s mind, but from a source that can easily be dismissed as trivial and foolish.  Indeed, Iago bolsters his own credibility when he feigns skepticism about the waking-world significance of Cassio’s strange sleeping behavior:

“Nay, this was but his dream.”  (III.iii.416)

As Iago intends, Othello replies by insisting that he shall decide for himself what to think about Cassio:

“But this denoted a foregone conclusion: ‘tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream.” (III.iii.417-418)

From here, Iago immediately pivots to the topic of the precious handkerchief that Othello gave as a present to Desdemona, and that Iago has stolen and is about to plant in Cassio’s possession.  Iago thereby weaves together “proofs” from various sources, each one small in itself but together forming a larger pattern of meaning, a pattern that, unbeknownst to Othello, has been predetermined to drive him mad.  The mighty warrior is no match for his malevolent servant’s interpretive reasoning.

For the most part, Iago acts as a mere assistant, letting Othello feel like he is in charge of determining what his wife has been doing and how he should respond.  But at one crucial moment Iago gives the Moor a shocking directive.  Othello has just decided he must kill Desdemona for her infidelity, and he asks Iago to get him some poison.  Iago replies:

“Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.”  (IV.i.214-215)

Iago makes this horrifying proposal because he knows that Othello’s rage is also mixed with sadness (“but yet the pity of it, Iago”) and might distract him from carrying out his deadly intentions.  By demanding that he kill Desdemona in their marital bed, Iago helps Othello perceive it as a heroic act with an epic meaning, a violent but noble triumph in the cause of restoring moral order to the universe.  Othello replies:

“Good, good, the justice of it pleases; very good.” (IV.i.216)

Iago has persuaded Othello to think of murdering his wife in their bed as pleasing, as “good, good… very good.”  This line is chilling testimony to Iago’s success in warping Othello’s soul.

This is the same bed that Desdemona, just a few scenes earlier, has playfully described as a “school” where she hopes to teach her husband about empathy and compassion for others (III.iii.24).  She is planning to devote herself to expanding his emotional self-awareness, but she never gets the chance.  The bed where she wants to cultivate their relationship in new directions becomes the place where he, in a single-minded rage, will destroy it.

Othello likes to think of himself in larger-than-life terms, as a legendary hero bursting forth from a realm of mythic dreams.  Desdemona loves him for his adventurous spirit, but she is also trying to temper his warrior instincts and bring out a fuller human being.  Iago, however, feeds his grandiosity, stokes his reflexive aggression, and encourages his naïve assumptions.  Othello, the proud and courageous veteran of so many fearsome battles, chooses, at this decisive moment in his life, to follow the easier, cowardly path.  Death and destruction for all is the result.

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Plane Fiction

The satisfying nightmares of Paula Hawkins’ novel “Into the Water.”

I mean it as high praise when I call a book “perfect for a long plane ride.”  To qualify for this lofty accolade, a book must meet every one of several demanding criteria.  The prose can’t be too dense, conceptual, or experimental; the reading has to feel effortless.  The plot should be driven by an ever-mounting sense of intrigue, mystery, and suspense.  There should be lots of dialogue, action, scene changes, and sudden revelations.  The characters should feel like a living presence in the reader’s mind.  The story must be emotionally intense, but it can’t be relentlessly gross, cruel, or perverse. This is the only time I consider reading contemporary realist fiction, which usually feels boringly mundane.  But for the purpose of totally immersing myself in a vivid literary world when cooped up in a plane for hours on end, this kind of fiction can do the trick.

I have two additional criteria that are probably peculiar to me.  The book should not be too focused on dreams and dreaming, lest I have to find a pen and start underlining passages and taking notes.  That would pull me out of the fictional world for sure.  Yet the book shouldn’t completely ignore dreams, either, because then I’m going to start wondering if the author has an adequate understanding of human nature, consciousness, desire, etc., and I’m pulled out of the story again.

All of which is to say, Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (2017) is a perfect book for a long plane ride.  The new novel from the writer of The Girl on the Train (2015), Into the Water has everything I’m looking for in this infrequent but high-pressure situation.  Hawkins weaves an emotionally complex narrative about the experiences, memories, and dreams (more often nightmares) of a community of people living, and dying, along the banks of a river in rural England.  I didn’t take notes while reading the book, so I’m not going to quote specific lines, but at several points I remember feeling pleasantly satisfied as a character slipped into a reverie or was consumed by a terrifying dream.  In each instance it seemed just the right time for that character to have that kind non-rational experience.   Authentic moments of dreaming flowed in and out of their waking lives, enhancing the overall sense of enjoyable fictional immersion.

I finished the book about a half hour before landing,  giving me time to ponder the surprise ending and figure out how the story ultimately hangs together.

Exactly what I was looking for!

Note: Thanks to the bearded dude with the Blue Oyster Cult tattoo on his right shoulder working at the Casa del Libro bookstore in San Sebastian, Spain for pointing me and my wife to their small but excellent selection of English-language books.  He also recommended for plane reading the magically engaging Career of Evil (2016) by Robert Galbraith.

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Dreaming, Art, and Transformation

An experimental workshop offers a glimpse of the potential power of a dreaming collective.

The full impact of the Dream Mapping Project’s workshop in New York City won’t be known for a while, as each artist who participated now goes forth to reflect, imagine, and create new works.  But it was clear that everyone felt the vibrant intensity of the dreams we shared and the dynamism of our interactions with each other, and I’m not alone in saying it was the most powerful process of exploring dreams I have ever experienced.

We gathered on Friday morning, May 11, for an open-air breakfast at the Butcher’s Daughter restaurant, seven of us sitting outside at a table set for four.  It was a beautiful sunny day, and as the relentlessly honking trucks and cars roared past on the street just a few feet away, we had our first chance to talk and get to know each other.  We had been meeting via video conference for several months, but this was the first time most of us had met in person.

From the restaurant we walked to our base camp for the weekend, a second-story loft on a tiny street curving through the heart of Chinatown.  It was a perfect space for our needs, with gentle theater lighting, a small stage, a couch, several chairs, a restroom, a curtained area with a video projector, and a tea and snack station.

We started with introductions, as each participant told the rest of us about their family background, cultural traditions, artistic practices, and international journeys as immigrants.  We talked about sleep, and dreams, and the various ideas and theories people have developed to interpret their dreams.  I told them about the general dream-sharing process we would be using during the workshop, and I described the most important principles for making sure this process became a positive experience for everyone, drawing on Jeremy Taylor’s basic approach to projective dreamwork.  I emphasized the need for everyone to feel safe and respected, and I encouraged us all to practice the virtues of patience, empathy, playfulness, and trust.

Following a lunch break, we invited a local musical artist, Rome, to officially launch the workshop with an hour-long “sound bath” performance.  Using a specially designed set of seven metal bowls, each one finely tuned to a specific musical note, Rome created a strong vibrational field within the loft space, playing notes, harmonies, and rhythms that resonated all through our bodies.

Now in a very contemplative state of mind, we shared for first time the dream we had each chosen to bring to the workshop.  The suggestion was to bring a “big dream,” a dream that’s especially memorable and still feels vivid and powerful today, even if it came from many years ago.  Each participant described their dream twice, in the present tense, to help the rest of the group get a full, holistic sense of the dream’s characters, settings, feelings, etc.  I asked everyone to give a title to their dreams, and this is what they offered:

Jennifer (from Mexico, living in Venice): Tasting the Moon

Viktoria (from Ukraine, living in Berlin): Giving Birth to a New Me

Alisa (from Russia, living in New York City): The Potato Dream

Victor (from Zambia, living in Oslo): Creepy Lungs & A New Beginning

Kristof (from Flanders, living in Brussels): The Ancestor Dream

Lana: (from Jordan, living in rural Netherlands): Wear the Dance Belt on Your Head

Kelly: (from California, living in Portland): Being Dissected by the Evil Alien

(Note: the titles may change, depending on how the process unfolds from here.)

This took us through the rest of the evening, as we eventually opened the conversation to include all the dreams and began pondering their various points of immediate convergence (such as family members, animals, flying, loss, fire, crying, hope).

The next day we spiraled more deeply into these dreams, carefully exploring each element of each dream and inviting everyone in the group to share unexpected feelings, forgotten memories, and intuitive insights.  Two dream-savvy visitors, Bernard Welt and Margot Jewers, joined us for a few hours to add their perspectives.  At a certain point Alisa took the lead as the discussion became more psychological, bringing in ideas from Freud, Jung, and Gestalt theory, and also more spiritual, expanding into realms of transpersonal experience and metaphysical awareness.  We paused for long digressions to hear each other’s personal stories, many of which had never been told before.  The dreams themselves became a living presence in the room, like visitors from another dimension, the cosmic +1 for each member of the group.

As the night wore on, we began discussing our plans to create a collaborative performance that we could present on Sunday evening, at the end of the workshop.  We had invited a few local friends to attend, and we wanted to share something special with them, something they would find interesting, entertaining, and hopefully dream-provoking.  But we had no specific plan yet, and we finally decided to end for the day, get some rest, and trust that inspiration would strike.

When we gathered the following morning, everyone brought an impressive degree of energy and focus.  Led by Lana and Jennifer, we quickly dove into a series of theater and enactment exercises, playing with our dreams in more actively embodied ways.  By this point it felt almost effortless to slip into the dream characters and let them interact with each other.  And yet (speaking for myself), it also felt utterly surrealistic to embody one of my own “big dreams” while moving through a space filled with several other fully-immersed dream characters, whose lives and stories and multiplicities of meaning I had come to learn very, very well.

Before we knew it, it was time to prepare the stage, lay out refreshments, and welcome the guests.  The performance went by in a blur, and I have no idea what the attendees made of it.  I’m pretty sure they had never seen anything like it!

But after the audience left and we were able to debrief among ourselves, it was clear that everyone felt this kind of process has enormous creative potential, far beyond what we rather spontaneously put together for that evening.  We are cooking up plans for additional collaborations, with a goal of presenting a group exhibit at the 2019 conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, to be held in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, June 16-20.

Although the workshop officially ended Sunday evening, most of us stayed a day or two later to work with Kristof for additional video and photography work with our dream characters, going outside the womb-like studio into the vastness of the bright, bustling city.  Once again, the dream exploration process took another spiraling plunge into the psychic depths, as our embodied dreams entered a different reality, disclosing new dimensions of meaning.

The dream I shared with the group, “Being Dissected by the Evil Alien,” comes from my early 20’s, and I have been studying and exploring its meanings for many years.  Yet the dream became something entirely new during the course of this workshop.  Being in a group of immigrants, the Evil Alien suddenly appeared as an immigrant, as a strange and frightening visitor from a radically different place.  As I let the members of the group guide me through a deeper exploration of the dream, I gradually became aware of the sensation of being metaphorically “dissected by aliens,” leading to a surprising shift in the locus of my perspective within the dream.

On Monday, Alisa and Kristof dressed me in a black cape and leather mask, and told me to close my eyes.  They walked me around for several minutes, spun me in various directions, then told me to open my eyes. I was standing in broad daylight at the intersection of Canal Street and 6th Avenue.  Truly, an out-of-body experience—bringing the dream into waking, and waking into the dream.  I have never, ever felt like more of an alien in the world.

I’ve asked the other participants to write some reflections about what they felt during and after the workshop, so I will wait until I hear from them before making too many big-picture comments about what it all meant.  One thing was very clear on that last night, however—everyone had gained a dramatically deeper insight into their own big dream, and into dreaming in general.  The group somehow generated an unusually high degree of trust, engagement, and creativity that made those insights possible.  The question I’m now pondering is, how exactly did that happen?

We had done a lot of preparatory work by phone, video, and email, and that certainly helped when we finally got together for the workshop.  Alisa arranged for an excellent meeting space, and Lana, Kristof, and Jennifer lent us their theatrical skills.  Jeremy Taylor’s approach to group dream-sharing, with its emphasis on the “If it were my dream” preface, provided a simple, common language we could use to safely and respectfully navigate through each other’s dreamscapes.

Perhaps the most important factor was what I am calling (in retrospect) our multi-polar approach to leadership.  Alisa and I set the project in motion, and we both made introductory comments at the start of the workshop.  But after that, the process took on a life of its own, as different members of the group stepped forward at various points to guide the next twist of the spiral.  The final performance was a thoroughly collaborative effort that emerged organically, with no fixed plans or expectations.  The multiplicities of the group—multiplicities of personality, culture, gender, race, sexuality, and artistic media—became an amazing source of interpretive strength.

Two other serendipitous events helped prepare me for the workshop.  The first came on Wednesday, the day before I traveled to New York, when I had a cup of tea with Delanna Studi, who wrote and performed the one-woman show “And So We Walked,” a fascinating dramatic memoir about her journey, in waking and dreaming, to reconnect with her Cherokee heritage.  I saw the show that evening at Portland Center Stage, and felt extremely inspired by her courage, creativity, and deep wisdom about the ways of dreaming.  The second came the next morning, on the flight to New York, when I read a book I had recently bought, Jon Lipsky’s Dreaming Together: Explore Your Dreams by Acting Them Out (2008), which I figured might give me some ideas for the workshop.  Indeed it did!  I’ll close here with some quotes from Lipsky, a powerfully creative dreamer in his own right and a long-time professor of theater at Boston University:

“It is this quality—that dreams are both part of us and apart from us—that makes them so valuable to anyone interested in their inner life, and to artists in particular.”

“Dream Enactment is a laboratory for collaborative playmaking.  Each dream has to be explored by the ensemble.”

“Dream Theater is a laboratory for practicing the art of ‘rotating’ leadership.”

“So: imagine a nightclub—small round tables, low light, candles—and up where the jazz band would play there’s a stage.  On that stage a troupe of actors appears for late-night dreams.  A soundman with a synthesizer sits off to one side and starts tolling a bell. The Dream Show is about to start. For the next forty-five minutes, the troupe will present a set of dreams like a set of jazz with themes woven together through image and narrative like some kind of theatrical music. The troupe takes a break and over good wine or strong coffee members of the audience, stimulated by the dream set, share their own reminiscences of dream life. The bell tolls again and a second set of dreams is enacted. Maybe even some dreams culled from the audience are presented as an encore. This is one vision of a Theater of Dreams: a place where actors and audience re-experience their dreams. The style would not be dreamy, but precise. The goal would be to have the audience dream the actors’ dreams. The breadth of experience that we all possess in dreams—what I call ‘Our Own Shakespearean Stage’—would be revealed. Actors and audience would come together in a world of imagination where the fantastic and the mundane sit side by side and our passions are unleashed in the most ordinary circumstances. Here we feel the overlap of our dreamscapes with our waking life, and we leave the theater feeling that our world is much fuller than we usually allow. The magic of a dream show is that it’s essentially autobiographical, a true personal story distilled and embellished by the creativity of the dreamer’s dream weaver. The Dream Café demands a commitment to be true to the dream story, while crafting a theater piece that resonates on a more universal level. This is an attempt to stretch the boundaries of contemporary theater by throwing our intimate, personal, imagistic experiences on a larger archetypal canvas.”

 

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Art, Immigration, and Dreaming: An Experimental Workshop

An international group of artists join together to explore their dreams.

Next weekend (May 11-13), six professional artists and I will gather in New York City for an experimental workshop on the interplay of dreaming, artistic creativity, and the realities of life as an immigrant.  The participants are an incredibly talented group, and I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to learn from them.  The artists include:

Alisa Minyukova. Born in Leningrad, living in New York City.

Victor Mutelekesha. Born in Zambia, living in Oslo, Norway. 

Jennifer Cabrera Fernandez. Born in Mexico, living in Venice, Italy.

Viktoria Sorochinski. Born in Ukraine, living in Berlin, Germany.

Lana Nasser. Born in Jordan, living in the Netherlands.

Kristof Persyn. Born in the Netherlands, living in Belgium.

Alisa originally came up with the idea for the project, and since the beginning of the year she and I have been in regular conversation with these artists via video conferences, talking about their dreams and exploring questions of language, identity, and meaning in both art and dreaming.  As an overarching concept for the workshop, Alisa has been developing the idea of “dream mapping.” We will experiment and play with various ways of mapping the terrain of our dreaming landscapes, orienting ourselves to their most important features, and tracking our dream personas as they journey through these imaginal realms.  Each artist brings a lifetime of personal and cultural experience with dreaming, which bodes well for the creative energies we hope to generate together.

Two other people have been invited to join the workshop at certain points to add their ideas to the mix.  Bernard Welt, a long-time friend from the International Association for the Study of Dreams and a leading expert on dreaming and the arts, will lead a discussion about dream journals, sharing dreams, and mapping dream content.  And Rome Omboy, an artist and healer, will open and close the workshop with a Singing Bowl meditation.

A major motivation for the gathering is the rising hostility and violence towards immigrants all over the world.  We believe artists can be a powerful force in promoting greater recognition of our shared humanity, especially artists who are deeply attuned to the multiple identities that emerge within their own dreaming depths.  The goal of the workshop will be to generate creative insights about overcoming fears of otherness and illuminate new paths toward personal and collective integration.

Kristof will be creating a video documentary of the workshop, which is sure to become an interesting creative work of its own.

 

 

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A Dream of Love: Interpreting the Dream Ballet in OSF’s Oklahoma!

Peeling away Freudian assumptions to reach a deeper human truth about the capacity to love.

A radiant new production of the musical Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival re-interprets a classic American love story for contemporary audiences.  With bold innovations in casting, staging, and choreography, the OSF production differs in many ways from the 1943 Broadway stage version and the 1955 Oscar-winning film.  Far from changing the story, these innovations amplify and extend its original, joyful spirit.

This is especially true with “the Dream Ballet,” the elaborate dance sequence that ends Act I.  Created by the legendary Agnes de Mille, the Dream Ballet has become an icon in the history of American musicals.  The new OSF production, directed by Bill Rauch and choreographed by Ann Yee, intensifies the emotional energy of this central moment in the play and deepens our psychological insight into the feelings and motivations of the characters.

At the risk of theatrical heresy, I will say the OSF production of the Dream Ballet is better than the original. It goes further in illuminating the emotional heart of this dramatized nightmare, and it peels away the original version’s mistaken psychoanalytic assumptions about female sexuality to reveal a deeper human truth about the capacity to love.

A quick recap of the plot: Set in the Oklahoma territory in 1906, just before official statehood, the story revolves around two love triangles.  In one, a cowboy (Curly) and a farmhand (Jud) vie for the affections of a farmer’s daughter (Laurey).  In the other, cowboy Will Parker and Ali Hakim, a Persian traveling salesman, are both involved with Ado Annie, one of Laurey’s girlfriends.

The OSF production makes two significant changes in casting.  Curly is played by a woman, Tatiana Wechsler, and Ado Annie is now Ado Andy, played by a man, Jonathan Luke Stevens.  The love triangles are the same, but the gender dynamics have changed, and the Dream Ballet changes, too.

The new production makes it easier to recognize that Laurey’s dream is not about a romantic choice between Curly and Jud.  The preceding scenes make it clear that Laurey only agreed to go to the Box Social with Jud in order to spite Curly (“I did it because Curly was so fresh”), and she confesses to Aunt Eller that she’s deeply scared of the brooding, resentful Jud: “Sumpin’ wrong inside him, Aunt Eller… I know what I’m talkin’ about.” In the OSF version, Laurey’s romantic desires are obviously inclined toward the female Curly, which doubly emphasizes her sexual disinterest in Jud.

What, then, is Laurey dreaming about, if not a choice of Jud versus Curly?

The dream begins with a playfully sensual dance, in which Laurey revels in the pure freedom of movement and feeling that open up to her within this imaginal space.  A spotlight tracks her as she dances and floats across the stage, casting an enormous, graceful shadow on the screen behind.  Then Curly enters the dream and joins her dance, along with other shadow spirits who further enliven the increasingly romantic atmosphere.  The dancing gradually morphs into a beautiful wedding procession.  But just as Laurey is ready to pledge her vows to Curly, Jud steps between them.

Everything suddenly darkens, as Jud takes control of the dream space and everyone’s behavior within it. He seizes Laurey, casts Curly aside, and forces all the other characters to conform to his personal desires, desires that have been stoked by the pornographic pictures in his smoke house.  The women from these pictures now enter into the dream and move around the stage like harlequin puppets, mimicking sexual acts with a robotic lack of emotion.

The most striking innovation in the OSF version of the Dream Ballet occurs at this point, when Jud commands that two characters with non-traditional gender presentations be forced to switch their clothing, so they look like a “normal” man and woman.

Laurey seems utterly helpless as Jud imposes his will on her dreamscape, turning it into a nightmare of paralyzing weakness and vulnerability.  When Jud rises up against Curly and violently attacks her, pounding her with wooden logs and punching her mercilessly, Laurey is terrified that Curly might actually die under the assault.

At that moment, Laurey’s agency suddenly returns.  She steps between them, letting Jud know she will accept him if he will let Curly live.  Jud agrees, the violence ceases, and the dream ends.

If, as I’ve suggested, the dream is not about Laurey’s romantic indecision between Curly and Jud, then perhaps their presence in her dream should be viewed in less literal terms.  Perhaps their significance is more symbolic or metaphorical in meaning.

A good way of testing that idea is to apply the “Gestalt” approach of psychologist Frederick Perls (1893-1970).  Perls taught that one way to explore dreams is to treat them as inner theatrical productions, with every element of the dream—each object, setting, and character—representing some metaphorical aspect of the dreamer’s own personality.  The dramatic conflicts in dreams reveal parts of ourselves that are immature, alienated, or not yet integrated. The better we understand these conflicts, the more fully we can grow into our innate potentials for health and wholeness.

This is just one way to look at dreams, and many others could be validly applied here.  But let’s see where a Gestalt approach leads.

For Laurey, her conflicts in the play revolve around one of the most frightening experiences of human life: falling in love.  If she yields to her feelings for Curly, Laurey will have to let down her guard and emotionally open herself more than she ever has before.  She will become a new interpersonal being, a sexually mature adult, an intimate romantic partner.  To fall in love is to undergo a total transformation of the self.  The first scenes of the play make it clear that Laurey is, indeed, falling deeply in love with Curly, who just as clearly loves her back.  But for some reason, Laurey cannot openly express her feelings.  What’s holding her back?

This is where the Gestalt approach may help.  Using this method, we look for aspects of Laurey’s personality that can be described metaphorically as an “inner Jud” threatening to destroy her budding love with Curly.  And here, I believe, we come to an intriguing notion.  At least twice in the early parts of the play, Laurey behaves in quite Jud-like ways.

First, Laurey’s response to Curly’s songs to her (“The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and “People Will Say We’re in Love”) follows the same emotional trajectory as Jud’s response to Curly’s song to him (“Poor Jud”)—their initial enchantment with Curly’s alluring visions turning to bitterness and disillusionment at how far the visions fall from reality.  Laurey berates Curly after the “Surrey” song, saying “Why’d you come around here with yer stories and lies, gittin’ me all worked up that-a-way?”, before furiously slamming the door on her.  Laurey’s angry distrust blocks her from accepting the uncertain future of a romantic relationship with Curly, just as Jud’s angry distrust prevents him from forming any kind of relationship at all.

Second, when Laurey accepts Jud’s invitation to the Box Social, her goal is not to spend more time with Jud, but rather to provoke a jealous reaction in Curly.  Whether intentionally or not, Laurey tries to manipulate both of them to suit her personal needs and desires.  She treats Jud as an impersonal tool, and Curly as a passive object for her to control.  This is ultimately Jud’s deepest character flaw: his obsession with dehumanizing fantasies of power and control that seem to fulfill his wishes but in fact only make it harder for him to become truly intimate with real humans.

None of this is to suggest that Laurey is exactly like Jud in all ways, or that we should feel more sympathy for his violent behavior.  Rather, this Gestalt-informed approach suggests the Dream Ballet is a metaphorical vision of why exactly Laurey is having so much difficulty letting herself fall in love: She’s too much like Jud. To enter into a truly mutual and loving relationship with Curly, Laurey must first deal with the problematic qualities she shares with Jud.  As her dream vividly portrays, these qualities will kill any chance of a real relationship with Curly.

Laurey seems unable to stop Jud’s attacks on Curly in the dream, until she makes the active, conscious decision to embrace Jud.  Again, this does not signal Laurey’s romantic preference for Jud.  In a Gestalt view, this means that Laurey realizes in the dream the only way to save her love for Curly is to take responsibility for her own Jud-like qualities and grow into a larger self that can encompass these energies without being overwhelmed or dominated by them.  This greater emergent self is prefigured in the OSF production with Laurey’s magnified dancing shadow, a dark but graceful harbinger of growth to come.

To sum it up in Shakespearean terms, Laurey comes to a realization similar to that of Prospero at the end of The Tempest: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” (V.i.275-276)

Unfortunately, when Laurey awakens she immediately (mis)interprets the dream in a literalistic way, as instructing her to choose Jud over Curly. It takes the second act of the play for Laurey to recognize her mistake and learn how to express her true feelings.  She finally agrees to join Curly in marriage, and she rallies the strength to confront the “outer” Jud and tell him he’s fired.  In both instances, Laurey speaks with greater confidence, maturity, and passion than ever before.  She has indeed grown to become a newly conscious being, sure of her own expanded power, and yet willing to open herself fully and lovingly to another.

I would offer this same argument about the meaning of the Dream Ballet in the original production of Oklahoma!, but it would be a tougher case to make.  This is why I say the OSF production is better than the original, which was overlaid with so many Freudian preconceptions that Laurey’s deeper conflict is harder to appreciate.

According to Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories were enormously influential in the mid-20th century United States, dreams are fantasy fulfillments of unconscious wishes, usually sexual, that remain unfulfilled in waking life.  The Dream Ballet seems to fit this theory perfectly: Laurey naturally desires a sexual relationship with a real man, not a boy, and Jud’s postcard girls symbolize her own repressed erotic wishes.  Laurey’s mind may prefer Curly, but her loins favor the hot, fiery Jud. To resolve this conflict and fulfill her unconscious wish, the dream sets it up so that Laurey’s embrace of Jud appears to be a morally virtuous self-sacrifice, rather than the lustfully satisfying fantasy it truly is.  Both ego and id get what they want.

In the original staging, with Jud and Curly cast as men, such an interpretation makes a superficial kind of sense, especially with Curly having a gun in the dream that won’t shoot, a classic Freudian symbol of male impotence.  And yet this interpretation depends on a theory about “hidden” female sexual desire that is problematic, to say the least.  It suggests Laurey’s resistance to Jud is actually repressed unconscious desire.  When she says no to him, she’s really wanting to say yes.

As I’ve noted above, there is nothing in the text to justify the idea that Laurey is romantically attracted to Jud.  Only if Freud’s mistaken ideas about unconscious female sexuality are smuggled into the story can Laurey’s character and dream be interpreted in this way.

The OSF production liberates Laurey from these psychoanalytic shackles and brings forth a more authentic dimension of meaning in her dream that was always there, but not as evident in the original version.  With Curly cast as a woman, it becomes clearer than ever that Laurey’s deepest conflict is not simply about sex, but about love—the frightening, exhilarating, and transformative experience of falling in love with another person.

 

Note: this post was first published in Psychology Today, May 2, 2018.

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The Horrors of the Dream Ballet in “Oklahoma!”

A brilliant exploration of the dark psychological depths of sexual desire appears in an unlikely place—a country musical from the 1940’s.

Oklahoma! was the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the duo who went on to write many of Broadway’s most famous mid-century musicals.  A new production of Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival promises to stimulate new interest in this classic theatrical work through innovative casting, staging, and choreography from director Bill Rauch and choreographer Ann Yee.

Oklahoma! offers a surprisingly complex portrait of dreaming, desire, and the unconscious mind, and I plan to write a more detailed appraisal once the OSF production opens in April.  To set the stage, as it were, I wanted to start with an overview of the traditional production, which opened in 1943 and has since been performed in thousands of other venues in the US and around the world.  An Academy Award-winning movie adaptation appeared in 1955.

Set in the Oklahoma territory in 1906, just before official statehood, the story revolves around two love triangles.  In one, a cowboy (Curly) and a farmhand (Jud) vie for the affections of a farmer’s daughter (Laurey).  In the other, cowboy Will Parker and a Persian traveling salesman named Ali Hakim are both involved with Ado Annie, one of Laurey’s friends.

The play both opens and closes with the joyfully optimistic song “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” and the action unfolds in the space created between those two happy moments of dawning light.

In the very center of the play, at the end of the Act I, there is a dark and very elaborate dream sequence, “The Dream Ballet,” intended to express Laurey’s conflicted feelings about Curley and Jud.  Other plays and musicals before Oklahoma! had included scenes of dancing framed as dreams, but no one had ever pushed the dream theme into such bold psychological territory, with so much sophistication and artistry in the choreography.  Much of the credit goes to Agnes de Mille, the original choreographer, who helped Rogers and Hammerstein craft what became one of the most famous scenes in the play.

In the scene just before the ballet, Jud is alone and brooding about his sexual frustration.  The pornographic “postcards” in his room excite his fantasies (“And a dream starts a-dancin’ in my head”), but ultimately leave him feeling empty, deceived, and even angrier than before.  He finally declares, “I ain’t gonna dream ‘bout her arms no more!” and sets off to claim Laurey for his own.

Laurey, meanwhile, sits down in the shade of a tree in her yard and drinks a special sleeping potion (“the Elixir of Egypt”) she purchased from Ali Hakim, hoping it will “make up my mind fer me” and help her “to see things clear.”  She slowly nods off, while a group of neighboring girls sing a lullaby about flying from her dreams into the arms of the man she truly loves.  The girls disappear, Laurey falls into a deep sleep, and the dream begins.

Each of the characters in the main love triangle has a kind of dream-world counterpart or avatar, a professional dancer who performs their roles during the 17-minute sequence.  It begins well enough, with Laurey dancing “ecstatically” with Curly.  After many vigorous upward thrusts and arousing leaps through the air, they find themselves at a wedding, walking down the aisle, about to take their vows.  But at the last moment it is Jud, not Curly, who appears in front of her.  Laurey is terrified as Jud and the risqué women from his postcards take over the dream.  Curly has a gun and tries to shoot Jud, but the gun has no effect.  Jud attacks Curly and starts choking him to death.  Laurey begs Jud to stop, and promises to go with him if he will spare Curly’s life.  Jud agrees, and takes Laurey with him, as she bids a “heartbroken” farewell to Curly.

At this moment, Jud walks up to the tree in her yard.  “Wake up, Laurey,” he says, “It’s time to start fer the party.”  Just then Curly walks up to the house, too, hoping she will choose him instead.  Laurey, now fully awake, is seized with panic:

“Remembering the disaster of her recent dream, she avoids its reality by taking Jud’s arm and going with him, looking wistfully back at Curly with the same sad eyes that her ballet counterpart had on her exit. Curly stands alone, puzzled, dejected and defeated, as the curtain falls.”

This marks the end of Act I.

The provocative content and staging of the Dream Ballet was originally envisioned by Hammerstein to be “bizarre, imaginative and amusing, and never heavy.” (Carter 129)  De Mille, however, wanted to shift the tone; she suggested bringing Jud’s postcard girls into the action, and making the whole thing darker and gloomier.  Virtually all musicals try to send their audiences into intermission on a happy, buoyant note; the Dream Ballet of Oklahoma!  has the diametrically opposite effect, which de Mille felt would be entirely appropriate for Laurey’s character and situation at this point in the story.

In a later interview, de Mille said she pushed Hammerstein to make the dream sequence more emotionally realistic, more like the kinds of anxiety dreams that girls and young women actually experience: “Girls don’t dream about the circus. They dream about horrors. And they dream dirty dreams.” (Carter 123)

Thus, the core moment in one of America’s most beloved works of musical theater is a violently realistic sexual nightmare.

The Dream Ballet is an amazing work of art.  It is also a remarkably insightful portrait of the dreaming mind.  For those who study dreams, Oklahoma! raises a number of intriguing questions that can shed new light on the play, its cultural impact, and the dreaming imagination.  I will wait to see the OSF production in late April before saying more, but these are some of the anticipatory questions and ideas dancing through my mind:

Was Agnes de Mille right, as a matter of empirical fact, that girls have a tendency to dream about “horrors” and “dirty” topics?  What might modern research on the dream patterns of young women reveal about the unconscious dynamics of Laurey’s dilemma?

Has Laurey unknowingly performed a ritual of dream incubation?  She drinks the “Elixir of Egypt,” sleeps in a special place, focuses her mind on a particular question as she drifts off, and then has a dream relating to her question.  That’s pretty much the definition of a dream incubation ritual (as per Kimberley Patton.)

Is Laurey’s dream a threat simulation, along the lines of what Antti Revonsuo has proposed?  Revonsuo focused on recurrent chasing nightmares as an instance of dreams that simulate a possible threat and rehearse our response to it, so we’re better prepared in waking life if that threat should actually arise.  Laurey has a dream of Jud threatening to kill Curly, which is indeed a realistic appraisal of the dangers in her waking life.

Is her dream a sexual wish-fulfillment, as Sigmund Freud would say?  In 1940’s New York City, it’s a fair guess the Oklahoma! creative team knew about psychoanalysis and its theories about unconscious sexual desires.  Laurey certainly has a more intense and erotic interaction with Curly in dreaming than she ever does in waking.  The dream’s sexual charge only grows with the appearance of Jud’s postcard girls, who stir up even more libidinal energy, with less romance and more raw carnal desire.  And poor Curly with his limp gun…

Is Jud a shadow symbol for Laurey and the whole Oklahoma community, as Carl Jung might suggest?  From the very beginning of the play Jud is portrayed as dark, crude, rough, hairy, animal-like, stupid, and inarticulate.  He lives alone in a “smokehouse,” seething with unfulfilled instinctual urges.  He could be seen as a radical Other, in the symbolic lineage of Lucifer, Caliban, Gollum, and Darth Vader, the embodiment of all the darkness that is not allowed into the light of conscious awareness, and thus banished to the depths of the unconscious.

Does Laurey misinterpret her dream?  How exactly is her action upon awakening (choosing Jud over Curly) justified by what she has dreamed?  In both fiction and real life, people who instantly interpret their dreams usually get it wrong.  The quick response often overlooks deeper, more important meanings that the conscious mind may be all to ready to move past.  (I call this “the Odyssean fallacy.”)

Does Jud misinterpret his dream?  Same question—why does Jud think the action he takes (aggressively demanding Laurey’s affection) is justified by his arousing yet frustrating dreams of the postcard girls?  What might he be overlooking?

Finally, how will the OSF creative team reimagine this classic work for a new century and a new America?

I can’t wait to see!

 

Reference: Tim Carter, Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical, Yale University Press, 2007.