Dream Analysis. - Dance Theater Workshop, New York, NY - dance reviews

What a queer year it's been for off-Broadway theater! Outside the Broadway belt, where Cabaret and The Lion King rule, the biggest hits have been a whole bunch of wacky one-of-a-kind theater experiences -- from John Cameron Mitchell's drag show-rock concert Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Shakespeare's R&J performed by four schoolboys to Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, a puppet show performed in a 500-gallon tank of water. Now add to the list Dream Analysis, a theater piece by dancer and choreographer Mark Dendy whose sold-out four-week run at Dance Theater Workshop ended September 17, though an open-ended commercial engagement is in the works.

The play opens with Martha Graham, high priestess of modern dance, at her makeup table. Dendy has been perfecting his hilarious and loving Graham impersonation for years at club gigs and awards shows-the severe simian face; the thunderous eyes; the cool, strangled voice -- only now he is joined by a second Graham, the Priestess's Reflection (Richard Move). These turn out to be figures from a dream related by Dendy's fictional alter ego, Eric Henley (David Drake, of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me fame), to his female shrink (Bobby Pearce in sensible pink-wool drag with pointy glasses).

The dream reminds Eric that while growing up as a Southern gay boy with his Holy Roller mother, he got artistic encouragement from his Aunt Winnifred, who started the local Judy Garland Fan Club and, incidentally, looked a lot like the shrink. Eric recalls moving to New York City at 18 to study with Martha Graham -- the two priestesses reappear in matching gold caftans, top-knots, and trademark grimaces -- at which point he discovered inside himself spirit of Vaslav Nijinsky (Lawrence Keigwin).

The plot proceeds; but remember, we're in dream territory. One Nijinsky becomes two, Aunt Winnifred morphs into Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Eric pulls on fishnet stockings and a fedora and a tux jacket to become Judy singing "Get Happy," the shrink sings a number about Prozac to the tune of "The Trolley Song," and Judy joins Martha for a dance with three Nijinskys wearing black trunks and silver lame phalli.

Through all this craziness and clowning, Eric and his shrink explore his shame, guilt, internalized homophobia, and fear of going insane. Dendy delivers a monologue drawn from Nijinsky's mad diaries with surprising clarity, and as Graham he expressively whirls his way through a famous credo of hers that speak to the heart of any artist's creative journey. And the whole thing ends with a silly, gorgeous, and ultimately ecstatic duet by Dendy and Keigwin as two Nijinsky fauns.

The amazing thing about Dream Analysis is that it operates simultaneously on four separate and ever-distinct levels. It's a dance piece with eruptions of pure choreography at the same time that it's a play with developed characters. It's a wildly entertaining and theatrically unconventional clown show, and it's also a deeply personal essay from the soul of a young gay artist that never lapses into mawkish confessionalism. Dendy's achievement as creator and performer is nothing short of a tour de force, yet his colleagues are no slouches. Move and Pearce play real characters, not drag caricatures, and Keigwin, besides being an extraordinary dancer, has the most liquid, seductive eyes since Theda Bara. Liz Prince's costumes are a hoot too. Still, for all its wild campiness and its fractured form, Dream Analysis makes a real case for the proposition that art heals.

Shewey is editor of Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group