Theatergoers should not miss Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College’s production of August Strindberg’s masterpiece of early expressionism, A Dream Play. The opening night performance includes a pre-show ceremony to inaugurate the grand re-opening of the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse. Dates and times are: Thursday, November 7, 7:30 PM; Friday and Saturday, November 8 and 9, 8 PM;, and Sunday, November 10, 2 PM. Tickets are $5/students, $10/seniors, and $15/adults. Thursday night’s performance is “pay-what-you-like.” Call 269-337-7333 for reservations.

“It’s a beautiful theatrical experience,” says Festival Playhouse Manager Laura Livingstone-McNellis (an alumna theatre arts minor from the Class of 1989). Her statement captures the irony of art and suffering, of art on suffering. “The way cast and crew combine movement, text, and voice to create the semblance of a dream is nothing less than stunning,” she adds.

The play depicts a female demigod’s visit to earth to explore the nature and depth of human suffering. Livingstone-McNellis’s “semblance of a dream” description and the play’s theme reminds this author of poet Lucille Clifton’s poem “sorrows,” recently anthologized in Poetry magazine’s The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine.

sorrows

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful        who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams
rattling their skulls             clicking their bony fingers

envying our crackling hair
our spice filled flesh

they have heard me beseeching
as I whispered into my own

cupped hands       enough not me again
enough         but who can distinguish

one human voice
amid such choruses of desire