THE DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW, CollaborAction Theatre Company, at Live Bait Theater. The born-in-the-boroughs characters who populate John Patrick Shanley’s plays speak in a scattershot thrift-shop poetry laced with profanity. Presumably the playwright means them to come across as giddily romantic, but the dialogue can easily sound just plain silly. Certainly it seems an inappropriate idiom for the play’s discussion of Jungian anthropology and treatise on gender politics, which goes beyond Mars and Venus to embrace the whole crazy cosmos. But Cupid needs a helluva arsenal if he’s gonna set things straight when a young neobeatnik’s got painter’s block (which makes him see Dantean visions alongside the beer in his refrigerator) and his girlfriend is likewise haunted, in her case by memories of her bohemian parents’ relationship.
