PUBLICATIONS
Published in a bilingual English-Spanish editoin by NoPassport Press as part of their “Dreaming the Americas” series, curated by Caridad Svitch. Purchase the play here
SPANISH TRANSLATION by Ercilia Sahores
AWARDS
Winner, 2012 Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition
(originally titled "Cut-Ups")
REVIEWS
"Kerry Muir accomplishes wondrous theatrical alchemy, melding Latin American magical realism with the iconography of old Hollywood to create a moving experience that is both fantastic and phantasmic."
-- W. Blake Herron, Screenwriter, The Bourne Identity, Screenwriter/Director, A Texas Funeral
"A short surrealistic play by Mexico-based playwright Kerry Muir about personal loss and the power of the imagination ... bouncy and moody, hungry and hostile, dreamy and daffy all at once..." -- Ted Hadley, Buffalo News
“The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me" is unique, powerful and magical. It mixes stark reality with colorful, humorous fantasy, while generating deep empathy for two very young sisters living alone in a severe and hopeless situation. Kerry Muir balances this tone deftly, from beginning to end. The play shows us more colors to tragedy than only sadness; it also shows us absurdity and breathtaking beauty."
-- Jim Uhls, Screenwriter, Fight Club
"Brilliant! Kerry Muir’s play is a deliciously lyric mix of innocence and mayhem. An original and wondrous achievement." --Richard Caliban, MoM – A Rock Concert Musical, Composer/Director
SYNOPSIS
Two orphan girls inhabit a surreal landscape following the death of their mother, a silent movie fanatic and ex-Red Light District actress. The girls eke out a secret existence in their former apartment, now designated as a disaster zone following a devastating fire. The sisters grieve the loss of their mother in distinctly different ways: Haley, the younger, escapes into the fantasy-world of the old silent movies her mother adored; while Renata buries her grief under an avalanche of household chores, and a strange, self-destructive compulsion. The girls bicker, dream, commiserate, entertain one another, keep house and live by their wits. But when Buster Keaton mysteriously appears on the eve of Haley’s ninth birthday, the boundaries of the girls’ reality are stretched to breaking point. The surreal, magical arrival of Buster Keaton sets in motion the unraveling of secrets, both past and present, and is the catalyst for the discovery by both girls that they must leave one another behind, and find their own separate ways in the world, if they are going to survive.
MUSIC (underscoring, pre-show, post-show) by composer Bettina Covo, available upon request.
SPANISH TRANSLATION by Ercilia Sahores now available.