BOY BASEMENT BATTLES THE DEMONS OF SLEEP
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I read it, then I read it again. And then I read it again. Finally I got it. Beau O’Reilly, who wrote Boy Basement Battles the Demons of Sleep, has a penchant for this kind of poetic prose, with lots of tongue-tripping consonants and dense images and a logic that dances around rather than walking straight from one point to another. It makes for fun reading but a frustrating evening of theater. You can get lost in O’Reilly’s fog of metaphors and other poetic gobbledygook. And in live performance, there isn’t a second time around.
In another program note O’Reilly wisely advises the audience to relax. He admits that his characters speak an odd language and explains that dreams–the setting for his protagonist’s strange odyssey–“are often funny and rarely reasonable.” He’s just so nice about the whole thing, it’s difficult to criticize him. But Boy Basement Battles the Demons of Sleep is not easy to follow, and it’s hard to get beyond that fact.
