Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

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Published: Apr 7, 2009

Despite the strange herbs and promising teas I've ingested over the years, I've never been lucky enough to have a lucid dream. Through their ceramic sculptures, paintings, films, charcoal drawings and photographs, six artists reveal that you don't necessarily have to close your eyes to dream — actually, the creative process of mental visualization is just as immersive as doing so. Their work gives a nod to the real REM cycle, too: Lindsay Pichaske's sculptures of waifs capture the strange dimensions of dreamt bodies, while Stacey Steers' collages of women walking on snakes (pictured) portray the hodgepodge of images our sleeping minds think up.

Staged in a teeny tiny theater with little more than a chair for a set, B. Someday Productions' plays risk being visually boring or, conversely, distracting the audience with a front-row look at the actors' pores. But the eight short performances — selected from almost 400 submissions from around the globe — do the opposite: Their use of rich, descriptive language, situational comedy and smart staging had my mind reeling with imagined places and people. Some of the strongest performances include a one-man show about living through the Iraq war, a sexual comedy about coming out the closet after traveling through time, and a drama concerning a Fishtown mechanic who suffers from PTSD. The latter, complete with sleeveless white tees and an ornery young man who says "youse" instead of "you," is all too believable.

In these very pages, we've railed against Baltimore, Boston, Virginia, the Bronx and every other silly city that thinks it can lay claim to Edgar Allan Poe. To be honest, we've been a tad cocky about it. In fact, we could learn something from The Library Company of Philadelphia — their exhibit of photographs, old books, illustrations and paintings modestly, and indirectly, argues for our right to E.A.P. It focuses on Poe's love for the city's first prominent literary tradition, known as Philadelphia Gothic, and the macabre men who led it. Charles Brockden Brown's use of spontaneous combustion, Robert Montgomery Bird's shape-shifting characters, George Lippard's opium-smoking serial killers — how could Poe not have been influenced by them?

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