THE SLEEP OF REASON
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The bestial, uncompromising black paintings depict with expressionist intensity a catalog of horrors: damned monks, killer cats, the Fates as agents of evil, the primitive god Saturn devouring his son headfirst, Judith beheading Holofernes, two Spaniards ready to detroy each other with clubs, and a witches’ Sabbath that exudes abject stupidity. Perhaps Goya’s bitter adage–“The sleep of reason produces monsters,” included in an etching–helps to explain the savage paintings and his own possible mental illness.
In 1970 the black paintings inspired celebrated Spanish playwright Antonio Buero-Vallejo, himself a victim of oppression during the Franco regime, to write The Sleep of Reason. Though Bailiwick Repertory’s potent production, ingeniously staged by Cecilie D. Keenan, employs an eloquent translation by Marion Peter Holt, what registers most here is not the language: as physical as its source, this Sleep of Reason chillingly conveys the isolation that fueled Goya’s art and the demons that haunt it.
Wearing nightmare masks (by Lynda White), the ensemble–playing cats, bats, horned creatures, and carnival revelers–look as if they’ve escaped unchanged from Goya’s sketches and paintings (which we see here in projections by Stephen Mazurek). Accompanying their dance of death is Joe Cerqua’s macabre music and sound design, so subliminal they seem extensions of Goya’s deafness.
