On the Train to Fairfield, Revelations
'That Poor Dream,' an Update of 'Great Expectations'
Alexis Soloski
October 9, 2014: Metro-North operates the Hudson line, the Harlem line, the New Haven line. But the Assembly’s That Poor Dream, an expressive, uneven update of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, is set on twistier rails; call it the flashback line. Pip (Edward Bauer), a college senior, is chugging back toward Miss Havisham’s Connecticut manse when he meets Magwitch (Terrell Wheeler), the felon who has anonymously backed Pip’s hefty trust fund. As the train clatters on, Pip journeys into the past, with scenes recollecting Magwitch’s hidden influence. “It was me,” Magwitch explains. “I lived rough so that you could live smooth.” How people make a living, roughly or smoothly, and what they make of themselves are the questions animating this nicely modern adaptation. (These aren’t exactly Dickens’s questions, but that matters little.) Created by the ensemble and directed by Jess Chayes, the piece plays out in a single train car. It uses Dickens’s story to explore the freedoms and burdens that money bestows, particularly in a time of profound economic disparity.
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