Theater Schmeater opens a 'Trapdoor' to surreal slumber

Dreams can be as unpredictable as Courtney Love on a bag of pills and bottle of Jack Daniel's. Their volatile power can terrify and amuse, leading one to epiphanies or, at the very least, providing fodder for fun cocktail conversation.

As fascinating as our own dreams can be, the dreams of others are even more so, making it hard to pass up on Thursday night's "Trapdoor 62: The Dream Interpretation Panel," at Capitol Hill's Theater Schmeater. So what does Seattle dream of? Well, our waking dreams may consist of things such as having a monorail or a nightlife that extends beyond 1 a.m., but in our slumber, we're an anxious bunch. Read on.


		Mike Urban / P-I
	Denis Johnson, left, Anna Maria Hong and Matt Briggs are part of the bizarre panel in Theater Schmeater's "Trapdoor 62: The Dream Interpretation Panel."

Participants showed up, dream in hand -- spare dreams were given to those who didn't come prepared -- and a panel of writers and artists (basically, a group of people who make stuff up for a living) were on hand to tell Seattle what its dreams meant. Given what a sham dream interpretation is anyway, the panel probably was as qualified as any expert, most of whom are about as qualified as a housecat, to interpret dreams.

The scene was set in the lobby, with poet Maggie Santolla, 26, selling $1 cigarettes (which were in fact test tubes filled with small, plastic pigs) and dreams, like the one given to Terri Weagant, being handed out. Hers was to be of accidentally eating a used Band-Aid and turning into an oozing scab. Did that even resemble any of her dreams? "Uh, no," said Weagant, 23.

Panelists were in surreal -- at times, absurd -- alter egos, some funnier than others. Dreams were offered up by audience members and analyzed by these "experts," who included Dr. Ferris Goodman (Matt Briggs, in a deranged shrink persona), Dr. Edvarda Nogies (Saya Moriyasu, who painted interpretations of each dream on an overhead projector), Dr. Denis Johnson (Denis Johnson as a Freudian), Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz (Stacey Levine, with a German accent) and Dr. Trisha Ready (Trisha Ready, as some sort of he-she country music psychoanalyst). They were somewhat moderated by Anna Maria Hong, who also produced the whole affair.

One girl offered up a dream in which she was inspecting a moth, which turned into a bat, which turned into an owl. Von Franz said it was a dream of progress (from an insect to a wise creature), while Goodman insisted that it was "clearly a dream of de-evolution."


		Mike Urban / P-I
	Shannon Borg lights the candles on a fish carcass "birthday cake" in honor of poet Arthur Rimbaud.

"Do you have any pets?" asked Goodman, "No," replied the girl. "Do you have any relatives?" he pressed on. The girl said she had two. "I would recommend that you eat one of them," he suggested. The girl wasn't even slightly alarmed, as she let us know that her mother insisted on being cremated and having her remains dumped in a soup to be consumed by the rest of the family. You probably have sat on the bus next to her and had no idea that one day, she'd be eating her mother.

Another dream was so long and rambling -- something about kids, cougars and the dreamer being on her meds while having this dream -- that my friend muttered, "See? This is why we should never, ever discuss our dreams in public."

One man confessed that in his dream, his boss asked him to kill someone (von Franz: "Well, we all know you have a terrible job."), only to end up at a house where a man was bound and gagged on a dirty rattan couch and a woman in a '50s dress was ironing in the basement. It was the woman he was to shoot, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. The house began to flood with water when he tried to leave. Johnson said he obviously had "Oedipal issues" and that he was basically admitting, before a room full of strangers, that he was in love with his mother. Somewhat uncomfortable, the dreamer crossed his legs and replied, "Now that you put it that way, I was just kidding." His date looked away.

As the hour progressed (after a scene from Johnson's play, "Shoppers Carried by Elevators Into the Flames" was performed, without any prior explanation or introduction), dream after dream, about spiders biting cats, midgets wearing plywood hats holding someone hostage in a public bathroom and passive-aggressive (hey, this is Seattle) turf wars fought via a giant turban squash were shared.

Most of the crowd was entertained, but some, like one of the friends I'd talked into joining me, weren't. "I ... hate ... you ... so ... much ... right ... now," she hissed in my ear shortly before a fish -- a real, stinky one -- was brought out with birthday candles as a sailor and an absinthe fairy sang "Happy Birthday" to poet Arthur Rimbaud. Yup, it really was his birthday. Wonder if I'll dream about that sometime.

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