Season 2, Episode 5 of the FX series Feud: Capote vs The Swans depicted a New York City meetup in 1975 between two legends in the literary world at the time: Truman Capote and James Baldwin. With so many culture vultures (Like me…) Googling “Did Truman and Capote and James Baldwin actually meet?”, the creators of Feud have confirmed that the entire episode was actually from the Capote character’s imagination. It was not inspired by any real encounter between the two writers. In other words, this would-be legendary “meeting of the minds” was just a dream.  

In contrast, it’s been well-established that Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Spanish artist Salvador Dalí DID indeed meet each other, albeit once.  The date was July 19, 1938. The two met at Freud’s home in London, where the doctor had arrived just a few weeks earlier as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Freud was 81 and Dalí was 34.  While both men had wildly different careers, personalities, and life trajectories, they had both achieved an impressive degree of worldwide recognition by the time they met.  Since the cultural relevance of both Freud and Dalí has not seemed to fade one bit as we enter the second half of 2024, a theatrical representation of the pairing of the two would always be welcome for culture vultures (Like me…).  

Lisa Monde’s wildly ambitious, patently fantastical Dali’s Dream explores an ostensibly much more bombastic meeting between “the father of modern psychology” and the “master of surrealism” than what likely took place.  In Monde’s play, Dalí (Dylan Vallier) accepts an invitation to visit Freud’s (played by John Higgins) sanitarium, where some fragile modicum of order is maintained by the doctor’s androgynous right hand person Adolf/Adolfina (played by Monde herself) and his long-suffering, no-nonsense assistant Pierre (Mac Stevenson).  One of the main questions the audience asks is an ongoing query which has been pondered over and over again throughout pop culture history: Was Salvador Dalí mentally ill, or did he just have, shall we say… an “atypical” way of looking at life?  An example is when Freud asks the younger man of a portrait, “Does it have meaning?”, to which the artist responds, “Just like any of my paintings, if it seems to someone that there is no meaning in my paintings whatsoever, it does not necessarily mean that the meaning is not there”. #Truth!

The first act of Dalí’s Dream, however, gets dangerously close to being taken hostage by the antics of the four patients of the sanitarium: named, unsubtly, “Yin”, “Yang”, Frank”, and “Stein” (played, respectively, by Sondrine Lee Bontemps, Habin Kwak, Seth Andrew Miller, and Ryan Wasserman) In the second act, however, it’s Dyllan Vallier-as-Dalí’s show the whole way through. The artist’s “fever dream” gets a little too feverish, with the surrealist seemingly getting devoured by the very world he created.  An example is when Dalí’s well-known phobia of the innocent grasshopper comes to life.  Some much needed grounding occurs in the last segment of the play when Dalí meets up with another cultural icon, his friend and rumored possible lover Coco Chanel (Leslie Renee).  

As the staid but charismatic Sigmund Freud, John Higgins is excellent from the get-go. In the showier role, Dylan Vallier is equally appealing as the play’s titular dreamer; the actor’s physical resemblance to the young Dalí is quite astonishing.  As Pierre, Mac Stevenson is a revelation.  Her comedic timing, both verbal and physical, is very admirable. The supporting cast seemingly show a wide range in performative experience, with some of the actors being quite seasoned and others seemingly at the beginning of their careers; that said, it’s admirable that the show’s creator Ms. Monde gave all the players their fair share of time to enjoy the spotlight. Dalí’s Dream benefits from many unique directorial touches, courtesy of Monde and Thomas A. Gordon. Some critics may find the play too self-indulgent, which ironically may be what Salvador Dalí would have wanted; at times, the play comes across as an even madder version of Alice’s tea party, with mandatory themes of art and psychology.  As if the philosophical conversations between two larger-than-life historical icons Freud and Dalí wasn’t decadent enough, Dalí’s Dream even throws in quite a large number of musical numbers, most of which featured original music by writer/director Monde.  There’s even a bizarre moment when Dalí starts rapping (!) and another where the artist breaks into slam poetry.  

At the end of the play, the audience once again asks the question of whether the man famous for his trademark mustache or those melting clocks was a genius, or just “crazy”. We may never know.  Perhaps the best answer came from the character himself in Dalí’s Dream: “A normal man cannot create such genius paintings as I have!” Who could argue?

Monli International Company LLC and The Onomatopoeia Theatre Company’s Dalí’s Dream runs April 5 – 27 with performances running Thursdays through Saturdays at 8PM, and Sundays at 3PM. Running time: 2 hours (includes intermission). Tickets are $25 (students/seniors), $35 (general admission) and are available at www.our.show/dalisdream. The Gene Frankel Theatre is located at 24 Bond Street (Between Lafayette & Bowery), New York, NY 10012. Subways: 6 to Bleecker Street, B/D/F/M to Broadway/Lafayette.

Photos by Shane Maritch.