Traumraum

Written and directed by Ahmed El-Gasseir

Performed at the Mission Cultural Center, May 15-17, in San Francisco

Traumraum (German for “dream room”) is a philosophical entertainment – and I only hope there’ll be many more from Theatre Anomaly, the spirited company that produced it and states that its goal is to make “new dance theatre works inspired by great essays on philosophy, culture, and psychology.”

A heartfelt “Bravo!” is all I can say.

But I also hope that next time the author of the script takes a more deeply thought-out attitude toward the text that inspires him rather than, as in this instance, treating it as something between holy writ and a comic book and the audience as a smart but unlettered bunch that need to be taught something important, with the benefit of humor..

Traumraum is based on Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the classic benchmark, and the work to beat, in dream interpretation since its publication just before the turn of the 20th century. Fortunately for this production, many of Freud’s discoveries, a number of which have been put into question, if not roundly disproven, by contemporary psychology, are still provocative, if not provoking: no matter how often we are told that sexual drives distort much of our thinking, feeling and behavior, and no matter how this remains a core discovery of Freud’s investigations, it still can be painful to hear it said explicitly. And we are still unsure whether the repulsiveness of some of the ideas is caused by simple common sense or repression. After all, my complete rejection of the idea that the moon is made of green cheese does not mean that I actually believe that it does. Does it?
            The stage at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco is set with, on one side, the inevitable psychoanalytic couch and chair and on the other, an ominously didactic blackboard (an omen that will prove unhappily true during the play’s weakest moments). Center stage is dominated by a dream space flanked by screens painted with fluffs of clouds against blue skies and by dangling cutouts of objects taken from Rene Magritte’s prop room: a flying dove, an oversized comb, etc. The dream characters act out their erotico-oneiric melodramas, with notable panache though not always inspired choreography, across the stage with great freedom: one half expects at any moment to see them fly off over the audience.

The substance of the play is a number of dreams of the Viennese bourgeois from Freud’s day and their interpretations danced, sung, and acted out by the talented and energetic cast (John Lewis, Winter Mead, and Emily Morrison the standouts) raffishly half-dressed in underwear and sleeping caps.

The effect is sufficiently theatrical and comic, though the insights proposed are often undermined by the presentation, such that sometimes I couldn’t tell whether the author was promoting Freud’s ideas or undermining them (while offering no alternatives) – he seemed to want to have it both ways, a tack, however understandable, that dulls the theatrical edge before it has time to sharpen.

The humor, unhappily, is often more signified than effective, and the “serious” points are often tacked on like PowerPoint bullets. There is one genuinely funny episode: a set-piece monolog called “How to Smoke a Cigar, by Sigmund Freud,” that by itself is worth the price of admission. And yet even its relationship to the rest of the script is gratuitous. At the end, the play turns tragic in a way that seems like an after thought since it follows little dramatic logic from what precedes it.

The character of Freud is taken by various actors in different scenes, with no respect for gender: an echt PC approach that, like what is noted above, demonstrates the deep intellectual confusion, or mere irresponsibility, of the script. Putting Freud’s highly masculine ideas and insights into the mouths of women is fun, but defeats any kind of interpretative insight. Yes, it’s very amusing, but what is the point? It certainly did not make the ideas more persuasive or seem less academic.

The show thus falls into the trap of much postmodernism: a combination of philosophical superficiality and failure of follow-through. To be fair, the play’s antecedents are as much Expressionist as postmodern and owe more to the Germans and Austrians of the early 20th century (appositely enough) than to anything invented since 1960.

That Freud’s dream interpretations have been for the most part discounted by contemporary psychology, and much of the theory of psychoanalysis now seems as outdated as alchemy, does not stand in the way of the brave author and even braver performers: they play Freud’s tortured readings of dream psychology as if they were the hottest Tweets from big science. It’s almost painful to see them succumb to fashions that were already passé when most of them were in their cradles.

And yet, despite these criticisms, as a piece of comic intellectual archaeology based on old news and questionable views, Traumraum is a curious success in that it both entertains and stimulates; it asks provocative and perennial questions and, for all its borderline callowness, refuses to be dismissed. But go with a friend knowledgeable in psychology, or better yet a Freud baiter. It will make for an interesting conversation afterwards and may even haunt your dreams.

The music is performed by an able string sextet, the ever-sympathetic viola performed by the author and director (who also served as the musical director – a man of parts).