'Dream' Delineates Gender Barriers

Author: Yvonne Chen
Staff Writer

In our society men and women are continually talking about a so-called war of the sexes. Television shows such as "Men are From Mars/Women are from Venus" infiltrate their audiences with daily meditations of the gender differences that seem to divide us all into disparate and hopeless sex roles. Recently, the troubling issues of gender and inequality were confronted in Hepburn Zoo's "Dream of a Common Language," which played on the weekend of Dec. 6, 2001.

"Although this play is set in a distant time and a distant place, it does not function as an example of the past, but rather as a reminder that our present struggles are steeped in centuries of history," read the director's notes.

The play opens: it is 1874, a time when the Victorian edict flooded all aspects of social life, doling out the public sphere to men and the domestic sphere to women. The stage is ablaze with reddish lighting and a woman in shown in silhouette. One after another she throws canvases into a fire.

What ensues is an anonymous day, which focuses on a circle of friends, who despite their love for each other and their love for art, are spited by the circumstances of their time. We learn the artist whose name is Clovis (Lindsay Haynes '02) is a broken woman. Something is missing in her life, and for this reason she experiences her "sad days" and she withdraws from the stresses of everyday life in this seemingly tranquil garden.

In a scene in which her husband Victor (Assistant Professor of Dance, Peter Schmitz) paints her, Clovis fidgets in her place; she complains of problems of sadness, that she is sad about giving up her art for a domestic life, that she is unhappy with the choices she has made but is afraid to go back to her art. He tells her in a gentle voice, "You have to be serious about something." But she continues to lament about the responsibilities of her marriage, her child, her house and her garden. She stopped painting because she stopped hearing her own voice, ultimately "the only voice [she] could conjure was a male voice." Victor abruptly screams, "Stop being a woman!" Suddenly, Clovis appears lost and far away from the tranquil garden. Silence penetrates the chaos. She seems to yearn for an esoteric feeling, perhaps the feeling of power that only a man knows. She asks him to touch her. "Where?" he asks. She looks up at the warping colors of the sky. The scene fades into eerie tableau with the image of the man's fingers awkwardly groping over his wife's heart.

A few scenes later we are introduced to Pola (Megan West '02), a spirited artist friend of the couple. With her bicycle, her bounty of stories from adventures in far-off lands, her eclectic costume of pantsuit and turban, her cheerful gestures and her humorous philosophies of the world like it is, Pola may appear at first to be the antithesis of Clovis. But we soon learn that all the women in this play are similar in one way or another. Pola hints at dissatisfaction with her rich lifestyle, for even though she has traveled far and lived a lot, life for her is riddled with irreconcilable oddities. She notes also that the women of the college were banned from the life drawing class. One remarkable line epitomizes Pola's sentiment as she remarks, "We were not allowed in class but it was acceptable for us to pose." She realizes how she has not totally been able to do as her grandmother had raised her to "develop a brain and a personality."

We soon learn that Victor is holding a dinner for discussing the plans of an exhibit. However, the women of the house are not invited.Clovis, like Pola was unable to gain acceptance according to patriarchal artistic standards. As a result, we learn that Clovis' self-assurance about her own worth uprooted with that exhibit as she fooled her into thinking that she was not good enough and soon after burned her paintings.

Much thought had gone into the world of "Dream." From staging to casting, "Dream" glimmers with the presence of something missing that is both beautiful and lost, something that one cannot describe in so many words or explain with the concreteness of science, but nonetheless rings with an unspoken contemplation on something lingering that is yet to be but screaming to be fulfilled.

Soliloquies portray a modern world in which the women and men try to be heard by and to connect with one another, but their attempts go awry. The male actors, Schmitz and Alex Poe '03, who plays Marc, Pola's ex-lover, lent a redeeming quality to the characters of the older Victor and the more naive and sensitive Marc despite the haphazard comments that they made, as their subtle delivery and graceful actions suggested the innate humanity common among us all. West, who stole the show with her emphatic performance of the secondary character of Pola, is humorous and introspective. Her presence, which serves to complement Haynes' volatile and withdrawn portrayal of Clovis, was one of the play's stronger points. But much credit should be given to director Jennifer Driscoll '02's efforts for her choice of cast, her staging that creatively placed characters in symbolic relationships with one another and dissolves that linked the frustrating emotional barriers from one scene to the next.

The play comes to an end as the actors repeat their worries into the audience. Clovis in a poignant moment draws her first nude, a mirror image of the opening scene in which Victor futilely retrieves her paintings, he rips open his shirt and in that same awkward silence poses for his wife with whom he is connecting in a volatile moment of confusion.