Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me three times, and I'll never see another one of your stupid awful plays, Adam Rapp.

Holy christ, I hated this show. So I was glad to see it eviscerated by the New York Times who conveyed how truly impossible it was to believe in the reality of the show. The trouble is, I sort of thought the reviewer was willfully ignoring that the forced stylization was actually intentional, and we weren't really supposed to believe in these people in a traditional sense. The characters of this hollow disaster are too extreme to consider in any naturalistic sort of way, instead seeming to represent the unrefined id of some vicious people being satirized.

Of course...the show doesn't work on that level either.

I'm not going to bother looking up the character names because like everything else on stage, they hardly matter. Christine Lahti is a spoiled rich bitch in Connecticut who hates her milquestoast husband Reed Birney and lusts after their close friend Cotter Smith. She convinces Cotter to murder Reed for convenient plot purposes. No--seriously. It's a poisoning that happens at a dinner party. Why not pour the poison yourself, Christine? Huh?

Anyway, Cotter Smith's son had some sort of breakdown. Christine and Reed's daughter is a pretentious artist. And Quincy Tyler Bernstine is utterly wasted as the maid but delivers an incredibly compelling performance in the midst of the inanity because I don't believe she's capable of less.

To be fair, the whole cast is quite good, but there are lines so simpering and stupid that even Christine Lahti can't save them. There are metaphors so blunt that an actor as great as Reed Birney will stagger under the weight of them. And there are shows so shallow that even Cotter Smith seems drifting through the murk.

Dreams of Flying is the kind of show that can only be amazing or terrible. At a time of economic downturn, there are few artistic statements easier to make than a satire of the rich which is why it's been done so many times before and why (partly) Adam Rapp fails to bring anything fresh or new to the table (other than a lion carcass--spoiler alert).

Here's the play in under a dozen words: People are animals. Even the rich aren't dignified. Oh, the humanity. FIN.

When a show is 85 minutes long and I check my watch, I know it's a bad sign. With this show, I was checking 20 minutes in. Legitimately great actors are wasted on a shallow, silly play of juvenile angst and depression that rings false at the start and falser by the end. I feel like the one plus here is that I was provoked to a strong reaction. But man, that reaction was negative.