From a Dream to a Dream (Hand2mouth)

[June 4th, 2008]

You couldn’t fault Bruno Schulz for lacking imagination. The Polish artist and writer, who only produced two collections of short stories before he was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942, inhabited an effervescent world of magical geography and constant transformation. Like a whimsical Kafka, his was a wondrous, soft-focus reality of leggy brunettes and bug-men.

As with other surrealist authors, theatricalizing Schulz’s art is no simple matter. A number of attempts have been made—two films and a 1992 play, The Street of Crocodiles, by London’s Theatre de Complicite—all of which have resorted to abstraction to capture the writer’s imagination. A new collaboration by Hand2Mouth Theatre and Polish company Teatr Stacja Szamocin continues in the same vein.

Conceived and directed by Luba Zarembinska, an early mentor to Hand2Mouth director Jonathan Walters, From a Dream to a Dream is, as you might expect from the title, more of an impression than a direct translation of Schulz’s stories. There’s a recurring plot about a young man looking for his father in a creepy sanatorium, but it’s just a clothes-hanger for a series of weird and beautiful transformations: a tailor’s measurement-taking becomes a sexual act; a parade of lovely women in vintage lingerie becomes a funeral procession; a childish dance becomes bedlam. These moments, which showcase the ability of both companies to craft evocative scenes out of nothing at all, are rewarding enough to forgive a narrative frame that feels stilted and under-rehearsed.

There’s a wildness about the project that applies to space and time as much as the sights on stage. The ominous Conductor (Karol Bykowski) calls it “the penetration from behind of time’s mechanism, the hazardous fingering of its secrets.” I suppose that’s a poetic way of saying the show doesn’t make any damn sense, and doesn’t need to. The mesmerizing flow of polyvinyl dresses, mannequin legs, Jeb Pearson’s frightening leer and Ida Bocian’s barely restrained carnality is more than enough.