Dreams’ is an examination of a complicated love triangle

The world premiere of “Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction)” at the Contemporary American Theater Festival has a title weighted with more existential dread than the play it describes — much to my relief and delight.

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To be sure, marital infidelity, the subject Jeffrey Lieber’s play tackles head-on, cuts to the bone of life’s meaning, and this show pulls no punches when it comes to demonstrating all the ugliness of secretive relationships. In fact, it probes more deeply into the dysfunctions of that kind of lifestyle than I typically see in modern theater.

After more than an hour of watching secrets and repressed emotions that have been simmering for decades reach their boiling point, we hear the character Adele, played manically by Marika Engelhardt of “Knives and Skin” fame, crystalize the most wrenching part of secret affairs when she screams, “There are things you get and things he gets, and that is how it works.”

For almost 30 years, she has isolated her romantic emotional needs in two distinct buckets: one for her husband, with whom she has raised a son, and one for her husband’s best friend from college, whom she meets for periodic weekend getaways at a mountain cabin.

But more than separating emotions, she has created two realities with drastically conflicting sets of facts. In one of these worlds she must confront the reality of death; in the other, there is only fun — or so she had hoped.

The whole situation gives lie to the notion that long-term relationships with multiple partners are workable so long as everyone involved has full

(See FEVER DREAMS 21)