“The Velvet Sky is a place where dreams and nightmares live,” muses Bethany, one of the leading characters in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s new play. The drama, which can be seen at the Wholly Mammoth Theater, is home to a myriad of layered themes and concepts which provide an intensely haunting experience.
According to Sacasa, “The Velvet Sky is as much about insanity and paranoia and psychological and physical abuse as it is about a creature that exists only in [Bethany’s] delusions and imagination.”
Billed as a “comic nightmare fantasy,” the play mixes light- hearted jokes with references to the mysterious creature—the Sandman—set against the very realistic backdrop of New York City. The plot is quite detailed: a story about Bethany (Jeanine Serrales), the mother of a young boy, who has not slept for 13 years in her attempt to protect her son from the Sandman.
The plot also centers on her husband, Warren’s (Will Gartshore) inability to cope with his wife’s problem. Warren takes his son, Andrew (Matthew Stadelmann) to New York City on the eve of his 13th birthday to escape his mother’s madness, but Bethany follows them, ensuing in a bizarre nocturnal adventure and the discovery of a terrible secret by Bethany and the audience.
This seemingly proverbial tragicomedy about a modern dysfunctional family combines unusually sinister legends and modern truths. The mystery is based on the tale of the Sandman, a creature who sprinkles sand in children’s eyes to make them fall asleep and, in the baleful version, takes out the children’s eyes to feed them to his own offspring.
In The Velvet Sky the Sandman roams around trying to catch Andrew before he turns 13 and leaves his childhood. Yet the means he employs are far from innocent: approaching Andrew in a toilet in a sketchy part of town, harassing him in an Adult Cinema, and trying to gain his trust using his parents.
The main accomplishment of the work is the juxtaposition of opposing concepts: the fight of good versus evil, the thin line between childhood and adulthood, consciousness and subconsciousness. The cohesive cast and stage crew brings out the imagery.
Each actor of the production depicts and compliments the complex nature of the plot. Serrales’s evocative stage presence drags the viewer into her confusion. Her reoccurring nightmares create suspense, blurring the line between reality and dreams. The passion of a mother floods the stage. Rick Foucheux delivers a nearly perfect performance as the sandman, though his true identity isn’t revealed until the last scene when the guise is finally removed.
The play would not be the mesmerizing experience that it is without the innovative direction of Rebecca Bayla Taichman. The theater itself, due to its size, allows for a great deal for intimacy of the audience with the drama. The interaction between the actors and the technical props is flawless. Set at night, against the backdrop of the city, the props are subdued so as to not take away from the acting, but the few well-chosen objects highlight the symbolism of the narrative.
The use of light and sound adds to the haunting narrative and acting. Long shadows cast onto the stage combine with spine-chilling music as a large white pterodactyl moves across the stage, its claws set out to catch the child’s soul. The periodical spotlighting of the Sandman’s face in blood-red leaves no doubt about the evil nature of the character.
All these elements are fused together into an incredibly suspenseful concoction resulting in a thrilling 90-minute journey through the night of New York and the land of darkest human emotions.
The Velvet Sky runs until March 5th, at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D Street, NW.
