'Sweet Dreams, Pillowman' takes an amusing, lived-in look at our pandemic lives

Monique tries to cope under Pillowman's watchful eyes.

 Most of us have probably had to put extra effort into seeing how much of the old normal we can bring forward into our lives since March 2019.  J.E. Hibbard's "Sweet Dreams, Pillowman" takes one newly single woman's approach to that difficulty and goes deep into the problem. The problem in her case is definitive.

In American Lives Theatre's production at the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival, it takes a while for the audience to know just how severe the psychic costs have been.  The suspense is delightfully laid out before we are let in on the desperation of the woman's coping mechanism.

Monique (Audrey Stonerock) seems to have  populated her messy apartment with three rodent companions (Carrie Powell, Maria Meschi, Chelsea Mullen), richly embodied in this show, whose chorus-line outbursts and sensitivities are projections of her state of mind. But their companionship goes only so far. Through captivating puppetry, another figure takes on fantastic proportions: one half of her couch, a pile of oddly assorted pillows, becomes a kind of Greek chorus. That's the Pillowman (Zachariah Stonerock) of the title, whose avuncular New Yorkish voice firmly, gently represents the reality that Monique must inevitably accept.

Near the end, a way out of her isolation and grieving materializes, about which nothing more should be said here. But it's a resolution that makes sense to the degree that anyone who went through the worst of the shutdown and the viral assault that caused it may have needed an outstretched hand to grant a new lease on life. 

Pat Mullen directs a cast of five with evident shrewdness, so that everyone contributes to detailing the whimsy as well as carrying the emotional heft of the script. The props and costumes somehow work through a sensory overload  of colors and patterns that suggest a life assembled accidentally in the wake of the cataclysmic plague. The borders between a real life, however impinged upon, and the imaginary overlays that enable Monique to survive are nicely blurred. 

The show creates the kind of disorder we can believe in and may have dealt with ourselves. Even better, it generates a sweet escape from the perils of a disordered state of mind and the promise of a wiser emergence from it than was ever thought possible. It's essential to comedy that such messiness be laid out as chaotically as the stuffing can be knocked out of a pillow. "Sweet Dreams, Pillowman" fulfills the requirements with controlled abandon. It's the perfect Fringe show for our times.