Bridgette Dunlap

Director

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

Adapted and directed by Bridgette Dunlap
from the story by Sylvia Plath
FringeNYC 2002

Back Stage
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Reviewed by Leonard Jacobs

Bridgette Dunlap, who adapted and directed Sylvia Plath’s melancholy short story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” does something admirable with her work and production. Instead of expanding the piece the way films “open up” plays when they segue from one medium to another, Dunlap found an analogous performing style suitable for Plath’s prose.

The basic premise of “Johnny Panic” involves a young secretary in a psychiatric clinic who becomes intrigued by the demon-plagued patients (and doctors) working around her. Unable to quell her curiosity, she secretly sets out to “chronicle the nature of fear.” Soon, she realizes she is at the mercy of a god-like figure, Johnny Panic, for whom she records patients' nightmares in his “Bible of Dreams.”

Clearly, this is no adventure in realism. Sometimes, in fact, the work departs on elliptical tangents that make the piece harder to follow. Still Dunlap’s style saves it - a hybrid of dance and drama in which character is subsumed to the storytelling without nixing the text entirely. Except for Johnny Panic - who is really just an anthropomorphic metaphor for fear - the characters are made identifiable through highly stylized, brightly colored costumes (kudos to Mandy Rowe). Using few props (kudos to Manny Silva’s “Art Direction”), Dunlap displays a keen sense of how to fill the P.S. 122 space with fluid movement, conveying the shadowy tale in an hour.

The show, like the story, feels like a nightmarish dream, and the enterprising ensemble deserves praise for helping to facilitate Dunlap’s vision without nailing down characterizations. There’s something so wonderfully choreographic about “Johnny Panic” that one awakens from the dream feeling quite refreshed about the possibilities of theatre.

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