Season Select: Sueño

Sueño

Translated & Adapted by José Rivera

From the Play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Directed by Marcela Lorca

Fast Facts

Playing: Hill Theatre | August 7 - September 26
Featuring: David Alan Anderson, Phoebe González, Sam Luis Massaro, Nathan M. Ramsey, Laura Rook, Triney Sandoval and Marcus Truschinski
Genre: Remixed Spanish Golden Age Drama
Last Seen at APT: First Time!
Go If You Liked: The Winter's Tale (2025), The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool (2024), The Liar (2023), Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2017)

About Sueño

A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 30% of U.S. adults report consulting tarot cards, their horoscope or a psychic at least once a year. The vast majority of those adults say they engage with these practices in a more recreational, “just for fun” capacity. Still, 1% of U.S. adults reported that they turn to their astrological beliefs when making a major life decision — approximately 2.7 million people.

Putting aside personal feelings about contemporary astrology, a fascination with the stars and what they have to say about human kind pre-dates us all. Shakespeare’s characters often contemplate their respective fates while seeking council with the stars. Observing the night skies and interpreting astrological events as omens existed in the very earliest of civilizations, all searching for “some vast cosmic unity” as Goethe put it.

This astrological obsession acts as the inciting incident for Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s philosophical drama, Life Is a Dream, written in 1635. A total solar eclipse (potentially based on several significant and dramatic eclipses of the early 17th century) coincides with the birth of a prince supposedly destined to destroy. After years in isolation, the prince is plucked out of his prison for his chance at the throne and human connection. If he fails to adjust to palace life, he’ll return to his solitary confinement and told the experiment was all a dream.

Calderón de la Barca posed questions of nature versus nurture centuries before psychologists began studying this complicated scientific contention. A departure from his more unambiguously religious works (like his popular and plentiful auto sacramentales), Life Is a Dream wanders further into the abstruse and profound, asking questions of free will versus a pre-destined fate.

When playwright José Rivera began working on Sueño, his translation and adaption of Life Is a Dream in 1995, he was struck by the play’s epic pursuit of big, eternal questions. Through Sueño, Rivera dances with the work of Calderón, resulting with a beautiful collaboration of wits some 300 years in the making.

And, just in case anyone was curious: Pedro Calderón de la Barca, born January 17, 1600, was a Capricorn. And Jose Rivera, born March 24, 1955, is an Aries — a powerful match when it comes to achieving goals and working as a team, according to their horoscopes.