Dream Man, James Carroll Pickett's raw, profanely beautiful solo drama about love gone bad, returns to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival after an absence of 22 years. The play was a Fringe hit in 1988 thanks Michael Kearns' riveting performance as Christopher, the self-styled sex-call-in king who boasts, "Give me a phone and five-and-a-half minutes, I will deliver heaven on earth. It is prime time; I am the best there is."
Kearns went on to perform the play in various American and international venues, but this time around he has opted to direct Dream Man, turning the acting challenge over to Jimmy Shaw.
It's a pleasure to report that Shaw more than holds his own on stage. He takes command of the monologue with the first words he utters (to a horny gay kid in Oklahoma): "Don't be nervous, first-timers are my specialty." Shaw keeps the intensity and heat going until play's end, some 50 minutes later (with the heart-breaking confession that "it's hard to make a living selling dreams."
Pickett wrote Dream Man at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when fear of the disease led many gays (and straights) to shy away from sexual intimacy; hence the birth of the phone-sex industry, followed by the exploding popularity of internet pornography.
Christopher may be a purveyor of anonymous sex, a cynical peddler of tawdry fantasies, but he is very much a human being who once knew and believed in the purity of love, thanks to an affair with Billy, back in Kentucky, when they were teenagers. Then both of them went to Los Angeles, where their dreams of success and happiness soured. Now Christopher is in the fake-sex business, and Billy is a burned-out male prostitute.
Pickett's world is
bleak, brutal and painfully sad, but he paints it with ferocious honesty and courage. Shaw brilliantly matches Pickett's bravery and intensity and delivers a galvanizing performance, one that captures all the pain, despair and defiance of a man who has been defeated but not destroyed.
