My overall impression
A fun deconstruction. I admit it is often confusing, but then I haven’t read A Dream Play since college. The “project” centers mostly around Miss Julie her struggle, or more specifically the-actor-playing-her’s struggle to find an interpretation of Miss Julie that she can apply to herself – or unlock Julie’s secrets for a successful show. Along the way she the Dream Play is used to break into the many levels of interpreting Julie’s story in a Pirendello-character-in-search-of-an-author quest, which keeps stripping away each layer as one dream leads to another. Like I said, it was difficult to follow as someone who is not currently studying the material, and the dream structure made it harder – but it kept my attention and had the audience in stitches.
I should mention that I did see the Neil LaBute’s Miss Julie at the Geffen and this was WAY better. The actors are wildly dedicated and hilarious (in an intentional way) They were also completely inside the same warped world full of trapdoors in logic and gnawing sexuality. As they chip away at the meaning of Miss Julie, things get hilarious, dark and often extremely academic, but I appreciated all the levels even of I didn’t quite get the motivations for writers/actors the choices. Things move fast between layers of dream and one needs a working knowledge of Strinberg to really get all the inside jokes, but even so I still had a great time. The ending didn’t make much sense in retrospect or perhaps it seemed to general a moral conclusion for such a rich exploration, but it made sense to the writers and I give them credit for being more well-versed than I. Congrats!
