Story, choreography and direction by John Kelly; set installation by Huck Snyder; film sections by Anthony Chase; lighting design by Pierre Lamarche; costume by James Reilly; wig by Andre LaFreniere; sound mix by Guy Story; music by Samuel Barber, Georges Bizet, Bernard Hermann, Aram Khachaturian, Serge Prokofiev, Giacomo Puccini, Henry Purcell, Igor Stravinsky, Giuseppi Verdi, Marek Weber and Paul Whiteman.
Premiere: Theater In Limbo, The Limbo Lounge, New York, NY, 12 February 1986.
WITH: John Kelly (Cesare, the Somnambulist) and Marleen Menard (Lady MacBeth).
The idea for Diary of a Somnambulist came from the 1919 German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In the film, Cesare is a somnambulist manipulated by the mysterious Dr. Caligari into committing a series of murders. The hallmark of this silent classic was its exclusive use of black-and-white sets constructed and hand-painted in an extremely stylized manner.
The notion of an alluring creature controlled by an outside force amidst this fantastic monochromatic dreamscape became my point of departure. We restricted the design pallet of the performance (costume, makeup, film and setting) to black and white. Dr. Caligari was present metaphorically, by way of a small cut-out figure spinning slowly but incessantly on a hidden turntable. For dramatic tension, I instead paired Cesare with another sleepwalker from the history of art––Lady MacBeth, played by the brilliant Marleen Menard, accompanied by Verdi’s music rather than Shakespeare’s verse.
Through a series of solos and duets, the two sleepwalkers interact with the set, the projected film sections, and with each other.
