12 Rooms, 12 Women Playwrights, and a Labyrinth of Dreamscapes (Feature)
‘A Dozen Dreams’ offers visions of an immersive present
Where do we find ourselves, how did we reach this point, and where do we go from here?
The new immersive installation A Dozen Dreams from En Garde Arts explores these questions in the form of a self-led journey through twelve rooms shaped by the dreams of twelve women playwrights.
A Dozen Dreams has taken over a 4,500 square foot retail space within the Brookfield Place shopping center, along with parts of its spacious Winter Garden lobby. The piece kicks off an ambitious spring for En Garde Arts — they are also presenting Downtown Live, an outdoor performance festival spread across lower Manhattan.
The creators of A Dozen Dreams hope to plunge audience members into a “labyrinth of dreamscapes.” It’s the sort of site-specific, non-conventional work that Anne Hamburger, artistic director of En Garde Arts, has specialized in throughout her career. After the shutdown hit last year, it wasn’t long before she realized a return to that kind of work would be essential.
Hamburger reached out to John Clinton Eisner, co-founder and former artistic director of The Lark, to help bring on writers. She wanted to pose them all the same question: What are you dreaming about right now?
“He thought he would only be helping me find some writers,” laughed Hamburger. “He didn’t know this was going to take over his life.”
Eisner helped recruit twelve acclaimed women playwrights, including Lucy Thurber, Martyna Majok, Erika Dickerson-Despenza and Mona Mansour. Then, he and Hamburger brought designer and visual dramaturg Irina Kruzhilina on board to help craft the physical journey of the piece.
“This is as design driven as it is playwright driven,” said Hamburger. Often a designer will join later and be handed a finished text they must bring to life, but here, Hamburger, Eisner and Kruzhilina sat down and crafted the dramaturgy of the immersive piece together.
Audience members begin their journey in the lobby, then move through a series of spaces designed around each playwright’s text. Dressing rooms, bathrooms and hallways are utilized along the way.
The first room, for instance, conjures an abandoned theater, with a decaying environment and broken theater seats. Through a window, audience members watch images of a beautiful, pristine theater of the past. The room reflects playwright Ellen McLaughlin’s state of mind early in lockdown, when even the idea of theater’s return felt like a far-off dream.
Later, in the ninth room, two crumbling columns and cracks through the floor represent the slow collapse of white supremacy as it gives way to Black liberation, a metaphorical interpretation of playwright Liza Jessie Peterson’s text, which she also delivers on video.
That’s one of two rooms where the playwright “performs” via video recording. In the other ten, the writer will be heard speaking (via headphones) as the audience explores the space.
“We think of the audience members as the actors,” said Eisner. “The whole notion behind site specific work is that you are engaging as much as the performers.”
Playwrights were free to interpret the question of dreams freely. “Did it mean a fervent hope, or a fantasy, or just something they dreamed last night?” said Eisner. “All of the writers approached it in different ways.”
As a result, even within its three part structure, A Dozen Dreams moves between varying definitions of dreams and dreaming throughout. Kruzhilina worked to balance both capturing each playwright’s individual perspective and creating a cohesive experience.
“In the beginning, the places feel smaller and more tactile, more individual,” she said of the journey, those early pieces reflecting early quarantine.“Then slowly the dreams, as well as the spaces, open up — literally, become bigger and more spacious — and we start introducing a different energy.”
For the final dream, audience members return to the lobby and enter a 25-foot translucent structure placed in its center. From within it, they look up to watch projected clouds as the final play, by Emily Mann, is heard (including musical accompaniment from Kecia Lewis).
A post-show online component, “Room 13,” is available for audiences to reflect on the experience and to share their own dreams.
Eisner hopes the show will “create a collective unconscious of the particular moment,” and leave the audience dreaming on that final question: Where do we go from here?
A Dozen Dreams runs through May 30th at Brookfield Place in Manhattan. Tickets are free.
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