interpretation of dreams
by Douglas Messerli
Jeton Neziraj Department of Dreams / presented
by the City Garage, directed by Frėdėrique Michel, Santa Monica, California /
the performance I saw was on November 10, 2019
Neziraj’s play, the author described as the Molière of Kosovo, is a
perfect example of their exceptional perceptions. In this Orwellian “dream
play” the writer creates a world in which the government is not simply
interested in collecting information about their citizens in order to torture
and, perhaps, kill them—one should recall that in Neziraj’s youth over 230,000
individuals were killed by the ethnic cleansing of Serbian dictator Slobodan
Miloševic, documented by numerous journalists and writers, including Susan
Sontag. The six republics—all in contradiction of the former Yugoslavian
country, a manufactured entity created primarily by another dictator, Josip
Broz Tito, who as a Communist supporter, allowed his amalgamation of radically
different cultures and religious gatherings, to oppose the Soviet Union—broke
up with terrible consequences with Tito’s death and the fall of the Soviet
Union’s domination.
The US, through Clinton and other administrators of his government such
as Madeline Albright, worked hard to stop the carnage, and eventually supported
the democracies of the Balkans, although Kosovo, given the Muslin/Christian
oppositions and the Serbian determination to keep it under their control, came
to it at the very latest. In 2008, partly in celebration of Kosovo’s final
independence (dismissed yet today by Russia and China), my Sun & Moon Press
published the selected poetry of one of the major Kosovo poets, Azem Shkreli, Blood
of the Quill. Yet, Kosovo’s survival is still very much open to question,
as Neziraj makes quite clear that he remains a very controversial writer in his
own country.
Is
there any wonder, accordingly, that this highly satiric play—reminiscent of the
City Garage’s beloved Eugène Ionesco—should suddenly appear, in a new
translation by Alexandra Channer, in Los Angeles?
In
Neziraj’s play, not only are the citizens of the country asked to suffer from a
deep controlling government, but are, quite absurdly, asked to daily produce
their nightly dreams as evidence of their own psychological imaginations. Like
Freud’s imaginative interloping into the private in Interpretation of Dreams,
the three central figures of this drama, the freshly hired young Dan (John
Logan), the aged Official (David E. Frank), and the even more ancient Master
(Bo Roberts), daily read these reported dreams in an attempt to perceive what
they might be saying about the people who report them: are they fomenting
revolution, hinting at their destruction of the controlling
No one knows for certain, certainly not the Master nor the Official; yet the new interpreter, Dan, seems to be able to read his culture’s own dreams and to report them quite effectively to his controllers, sometimes to great distress, dozens of the dreamers going to prison and, ultimately, to their deaths.
The enthusiastic young interpreter, however, soon become—like his
predecessor, Shortleg (Gifford Irvine), who evidently was able every evening to
fly away from his onerous duties, who has been taken from the prestigious 4th floor to the 6th, where if you are unable to cleanse you mind leads
to yet into another level from which no one returns. Shortleg attempts to warn
Dan, who, as brilliant in his interpretations as he is, begins to feel terribly
sleep-deprived and has fallen in love with one of his reporters, Night (Angela
Beyer), obviously representing the world in which he cannot successfully
partake, since all of the “interpreters” are allowed little time to sleep, let
alone sexual relationships.
The Master claims he never sleeps, but continually falls into his own
deep dreams at his desk, often attempting to delay them by pushing his head
into a bowl of cold water. Another dreamer-interpreter, Dreambuilder (Aaron
Bray), tortures himself like a religious penitent in a forced attempt to
conjure up the figures, including the Pope, whom the higher-ups demand he
channel.
This is a world of torture and delusion, as our young friend Dan soon
perceives. And, in no time, as he his stripped from his own identity as well as
his clothing, appearing throughout the last scenes of this play, naked,
realizing that there is no role for his desired humanistic behavior here.
It
is a horrific return to what the “boss” (the government) determines is
necessary. We can truly never know whether he, as the new leader, can return to
the humanism he has previously sought. Memos are delivered; lies are repeated.
The beautiful young Dan is established as a new leader of a world we might not
ever wish to know.
People’s most private thoughts are forced to be made public. Their
imaginations have been taken over by a government determined to imagine what
they themselves might not. Dreams, as we all know, mean something that cannot
be explained, even to ourselves. Yet this dictatorial society works infinitely
to tell them to the culture at large, a disaster, truly, to the imaginations of
the private mind.
Los Angeles, November 11 ,2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and
Performance (November 2019).
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