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  • A Dream Play Dramaturgy:A Glossary of Fragments
  • Kevin Riordan (bio)

When the members of Theater Mitu convened in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their 2012 production of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, no one save the director had seen the script. With this project, Mitu sought to strengthen its collaborative ethos as a permanent company. Eschewing the conventions of “preproduction,” artistic director Rubén Polendo challenged Mitu members to produce everything together within an eight-week period. This would mean working beyond accustomed roles, blurring the boundaries among designers, performers, and apprentices. Everyone involved would take part in the daily routine: the morning’s kalaripayattu training, “table work” on the script, creation in the rehearsal space, and the design and construction of A Dream Play’s world. As the process took shape, the company’s methods more directly resembled those of devised theatre, with Strindberg’s 1901 play remaining something of a decentered center.

Theater Mitu was founded in the United States in 1997 and has been distinguished by its dedicated research and training in world theatre traditions. The company is based in New York City, but has been engaged in projects worldwide, and it has particularly long-standing relationships with teachers and collaborators in Thailand and India, where they have coordinated artist intensives. The kalaripayattu training, for example, is a significant part—along with mohiniyattam and kathakali—of Mitu’s engagement with the performance traditions of southern India. When Polendo joined the faculty of New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi in 2010, Mitu added that city as a significant base of operations. As the company remains committed to its production work despite geographical distances—for A Dream Play, artists arrived from New York, as well as Juneau and Wrocław—it continues to interrogate and adapt its process. For A Dream Play, there was particular interest in investigating how company members can best reconnect and produce work that is responsive both to where they meet and where they are coming from.

In 2011, Polendo had been commissioned to produce a new adaptation of A Dream Play as part of Lincoln Center’s Directors Lab. Drawing on the six major translations of A Dream Play and further inspired by the adaptations of Ingmar Bergman and Caryl Churchill, Polendo re-crafted the language while maintaining Strindberg’s original scene structure and characters. He produced this new script in isolation from Theater Mitu, and on the first jetlagged day in the UAE, Polendo framed it as a new provocation, as an invitation for the company members to condense and collide their personal reactions, practices, and belief systems. In the preface to the play, Strindberg himself seems to call for this kind of engaged experimentation with both the script and production process. A Dream Play offers a world in which “the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities, and improvisations” (176).

Invited to participate as a nominal, and slightly removed, dramaturg on the project, I also did not see the script until we were underway. I previously had written on Theater Mitu, but this would be my first formal involvement with the company. My initial charge, based on my scholarly work on modern drama, was to help decode and contextualize Strindberg’s work and its broader milieu. As I reckoned with Polendo’s script, I realized that establishing the facts of Strindberg’s career—haunted as it is by scandals, absinthe, and the occult—belied both the spirit of his own writing and that of Mitu’s process. For this play, which traces the journey of a god through the jagged fragments of [End Page 161] modern life, there was limited utility in synthesizing or clarifying the contextual materials; instead, I began to thicken and disturb those same fragments, joining the company in a Strindberg-inspired spinning and weaving of new patterns.


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Fig 1.

Corey Sullivan as the Officer in Theater Mitu’s 2012 A Dream Play.

(Photo: Courtesy of Theater Mitu.)

Very quickly, my role as a kind of academic consultant felt too distant and, as I came to understand the company, I started...

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