Il Sogno di allora

Il Sogno di allora is the Playwright’s recurring humiliation dream, returning him to Rahway and making the shame of family poverty collide with his fear that his artistic work may fail. In its central image, his father’s business accounts and the Playwright’s theatre notes lie beneath a row of running washing machines, soaking in dirty water. He knows, at some level, that he is dreaming, yet the scene feels as if it truly happened; its distress persists after he wakes.

A recurring dream on the eve of a meeting

The dream comes on the night before the Playwright and the Blonde Actress meet in New York City, at the beginning of winter in 1955. It belongs to a pattern he has carried since early adolescence: dreams of humiliation that he has never told anyone about and tries to erase as soon as he wakes. The recurrence gives the scene a private history, even as the narration presents this particular dream in minute detail. It is not simply an account of a bad night. It is an unwanted return to an earlier life, appearing just as the Playwright stands on the threshold of an encounter that will matter to his later story.

The dream’s Rahway setting draws on the family’s documented decline. In 1931, while the Playwright was in his final year at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, his father’s appliance business collapsed. The family lost the elegant Victorian house they had struggled to buy and moved into a cramped apartment on the top floor of the same building as the shop, in a depressed part of Rahway. The dream places the Playwright in the kitchen of that apartment, above the store on Main Street. The setting recalls not only lost comfort but a family crisis that reshaped the home itself: the shop and the kitchen, work and domestic life, occupy the same narrow space.

Time folded into the kitchen

Within the dream, chronology refuses to settle. The Playwright may be a child old enough to feel the family’s shame, a Rutgers student imagining a future as another Eugene O’Neill, or a forty-eight-year-old who has somehow lost his youth and fears reaching fifty without producing a decent work in ten years. The dream does not resolve these alternatives. Instead, it makes childhood vulnerability, youthful ambition, and adult creative anxiety occupy the same room. His past is not safely behind him: it returns in a form that also gives shape to fears about the present and future.

The kitchen itself is altered. A row of washing machines fills it, all running loudly; behind each porthole, soapy water boils, and the room carries the unmistakable stench of sewage. This intrusive machinery transforms an ordinary domestic setting into a place where the Playwright can scarcely breathe. Its noise, filth, and pressure are presented as concrete features of the dream, not as problems he can reason away. Although he seems to know that he is asleep, the scene has the force of an actual remembered event, leaving him unable to separate recognition of the dream from the certainty that it happened.

The papers under the machines

The urgent task is apparently simple: save the papers scattered on the floor beneath the washing machines. But the papers join two kinds of family inheritance. They include his father’s business accounts and the Playwright’s own theatrical notes, mistakenly mixed together and left in the path of the dirty water. The dream therefore places the father’s failed livelihood beside the son’s creative work, making both vulnerable to the same damage. The Playwright feels a perverse pride in being responsible for helping his weak, ill father; the obligation gives him a role even as the scene overwhelms him.

He bends down and struggles not to suffocate or breathe. His hands fumble for a handful of pages, but before he can lift them toward the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, he understands that they are already soaked and their ink has run. The attempt to rescue them becomes a belated recognition that the work is unusable. Among the ruined pages may be one of his plays, a possibility that sharpens the collision between family accounts and artistic ambition without offering him a way to separate the two. The task has failed before he can properly inspect what he was trying to save.

His cry for rescue is not a prayer: the Playwright is not religious, and the outburst is an imprecation. That distinction keeps the scene from turning distress into faith or consolation. No answer comes; the dream ends when his own frustrated, angry gasping wakes him.

Waking life and the dream’s afterlife

The contrast on waking is stark. The Playwright is alone in his bed in an elegant apartment on West 72nd Street, far from Rahway, New Jersey. His wife is away in Miami visiting her elderly parents. The move from the cramped apartment above the shop to the elegant West 72nd Street home marks how thoroughly his circumstances have changed, but it does not cancel the dream’s return to the past. He wakes with a dry mouth and cracked lips, his teeth having been ground together; the humiliation has left bodily evidence even though its setting was unreal.

The family’s later history makes the contrast more pointed. The Playwright’s father suffered from heart trouble and “nerves” for the remainder of his long life, which lasted until 1961. His mother worked first as a waitress in a bar and later as a janitor in Rahway’s public schools. In 1949, after the Playwright achieved his first Broadway success and won his first Pulitzer, he brought his parents away from Rahway for good. The narrative calls this an unambiguously happy-ending fairy tale, but the dream returns to the years before that rescue and places the son once again beside the father’s weakness and endangered accounts. The material improvement of the family’s life does not prevent the old scene from recurring in imagination.

For the entire day, Il Sogno di allora pursues the Playwright like a heavy meal that will not digest. Its consequence is not a new action or revelation but a persistence: the dream remains active after waking, lodged between past humiliation and present achievement. By binding the stained papers to his father’s illness and his own uncertain artistic record, it gives a private anxiety a vivid material form. The laundry does not merely dirty the pages; it makes the effort to preserve both family livelihood and creative work feel urgent, necessary, and already too late.