Like Shakespeare, Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, wrote about very human ways of dealing with some of our biggest emotions. Life Is a Dream, one of Calderón’s most famous plays, is about a prince whose father is told at his birth that he’ll become a vicious ruler. In order to protect the kingdom from this terrible monster, his father locks him away in a tower. Twenty years later, the prince is given a chance to rule, but he goes on a rampage and is locked up again, persuaded that his brief spell of freedom was only a dream. Life Is a Dream became famed for its questions about what makes us human and what, in life, can be counted as ‘real’.
In his translation and adaptation, Cuban-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz has distilled Calderón’s immense canvas—with its poetic rhythms and captivating questions—into a contemporary story, brought to Cal Shakes by one of America’s most important directors, Loretta Greco.