Review

I recently told a friend that I am willing to pay a high price to feel, and the Michael Chekhov Theatre Company's production of John Patrick Shanley's The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, confirms that I am not the only one.

Although I found the most unexpected and profound thoughts expressed by the father, it was the daughter I identified with. Donna is in love with feeling love, and tormented when life inevitably and repeatedly imposes itself. I realized how often I experience the same devastation, as if the only place I want to exist is in that feeling, that the actual world can never compare or compete and will never be enough.

I know the difference between being addicted to the way love feels and what it is to really love, and after watching Dreamer, I understand that although the two can sometimes occur simultaneously, like when you look into your lover's eyes, when he receives the gift of you or when he buttons up your sweater, more often love and its feeling operate exclusively of one another. Love is like the cake, solid and dense, the feeling is like the icing, light and sweet, and sometimes you get to eat it all at once, but mostly you just get a taste.

The message I came away with from Dreamer is that love is impossible but there is no other choice. We have to keep banging our heads against walls, attaching and detaching, drawing close and running away, because the alternative is to be alone, without love, without cake and icing, without the one thing that makes life alive and dying less painful.