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Every January, I think this is the year I’ll crack what downtown maestro Richard Foreman is trying to say in his latest fiercely abstract extravaganza, and every year I fail. (And then I decide I’ve enjoyed myself too much to care.) This year’s show, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!, is a dreamscape with a dash of polemic. A biplane piloted by a dozen of Foreman’s trademark plastic dolls swoops over the stage as unidentifiable characters skitter about in what looks like a prison made of words. Strings of nonsense letters line the walls, and when the actors open books (or what I took to be books, anyway), they find blindfolds. While everyone bemoans our national ignorance, Foreman seems to say the problem is too much knowledge. In fact, we invite the barrage of facts that blinds us. “Ah, this will make you feel better,” says a recorded voice-over as someone’s head gets wrapped in newsprint. For the second year, a pair of video screens hang above the frantic stage of the Ontological-Hysteric. A giant X sometimes flashes across images of people clustered in friezes, which is clearly an act of incipient media criticism. (Unless it isn’t.) I’m eager to see where he’ll take his video exploration in coming years, but so far I prefer Foreman in three dimensions to two. The onstage action better captures my favorite quality in his plays, the sense that each one is a mental safari, the latest excursion through the strange, illuminating, inexhaustible landscape in his mind. — Jeremy McCarter

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New York Magazine Reviews

• Jeremy McCarter's Full Review (2/5/07)