The dreams we remember when we wake up are dead dreams according to The Dead Dream Machine, a horror play full of aerial acrobatics, gothic dance numbers, and puppetry. When we do not remember our dreams however, it is because they are too brilliant and disturbing for our minds to process while awake. We have “evolved an evolutionary mechanism” to forget those dreams. One man, a magician, has created a machine to harvest those live dreams directly from the dream world and bring them into the waking world.
The Dead Dream Machine, playing through October 13th at La Luz (135 Thames St.), is a series of vignettes that are the “live dreams” of a girl hooked up to the dream machine. A mix of short scenes are heavy on the social commentary and are more humorous than horrifying. The campy horror show is thoroughly enjoyable, and the variety approximates the unsettling, kaleidoscopic nature of our dreams.
The play is also filled with theater meta-jokes, playing with the artificiality of theater. It opens with four teenagers who break into an abandoned theater to see if the local urban legend of the dream machine is true. They become creeped out by the feeling that someone is watching them—and of course they are being watched, by the audience. The conceit of the dream machine is effective at drawing a comparison between the artificial world of the stage and the dramatic, imaginative dreamworld, our own private nighttime theater.
