Dobama’s ‘Wakey, Wakey’ a captivating piece of stream-of-subconsciousness storytelling

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

 

In 2004 in the New York Times, theater critic Charles Isherwood raved over Will Eno’s one-man monologue “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” calling the caustic and comedic Pulitzer-finalist play “stand-up existentialism.”

In Eno’s newest work “Wakey, Wakey,” which premiered Off-Broadway in 2017 and is currently on stage at Dobama Theatre, the main character is sitting down.  Wheelchair-bound, actually.

And while this similarly rambling, monologue-driven drama is written with the same infusion of off-beat humor, intentional digressiveness, and signature stutter-step rhythms, it is a treatise on celebrating life rather than a meditation on life’s disappointments.

 

Most remarkably, it is told by a physically and mentally diminished man in the last throes of life.  In an abundance of non sequiturs caused by increasingly fading faculties, Guy toggles between consciousness, subconsciousness and self-consciousness as well as between the trivial and the profound to share with us – aided by index cards to cue his fading memory – what he has learned in life so that we will not take ours for granted. 

 

The play offers an astoundingly up-lifting message delivered in a most depressing way.  It has been said that theater can be good therapy.  Here it is hospice care.

 

For more of this review, go to: www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/