On those nights when you are unable to sleep, wandering the house at 3 a.m., do you sometimes feel as though you're the only person on the planet? In Shut Eye, the extraordinary new Pig Iron Theatre Company piece that bowed at Swarthmore College's Lang Performing Arts Center before moving to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the theater/clown/dance ensemble teams with legendary experimental theater director Joseph Chaikin to explore the loneliness of nighttime. Meditating on that continuing fascination of Chaikin's (first seen in his 1970s piece Nightwalk with the Open Theatre), Shut Eye blurs the line between waking and dreaming in a series of musical vignettes in which reality is fleeting and sleep is just another event to schedule on your Palm Pilot. Funny, haunting and poignant, Shut Eye juxtaposes a surreal waking world with the realism of the dream state, effectively blurring the line between the two by establishing the absurdity of both. Employing music, dance and Pig Iron's trademark physical choreography (a couple tossing and turning in a ladder dream dance is astounding), we encounter a group of narcissistic characters whose self-imposed isolation is disconcertingly bizarre. A return to the more playful tone of Pig Eye's Cafeteria (1997) and The Tragedy of Joan of Arc ('98), the episodic piece includes newlyweds asleep at the dinner table, an insomniac trapped in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical and a brother and sister who alternate between a comatose state and taking high-level business meetings with a pillow manufacturer. But while the music and movement connect the vignettes with the appropriate dreamlike fluidity, Shut Eye's focus is on the lonely and disconnected, immersing the audience in a perpetual predawn where the partition between waking and dreaming is replaced by a near total separation from humanity.
>>Through Sept. 15. $16. The Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. 215.413.1318 or 215.925.9914.
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