Calderon’s Two Dreams

Calderon’s Two Dreams is a repertory performance of two classics by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. His first masterpiece, Life Is a Dream (1635), deals with questions of freedom and choice in a confusing reality. As his career soared, he felt the need to go deeper into his own spirit, and he completely rewrote the 1635 play to examine deeper questions. In Life Is a Dream (1677), the setting changes to the court of the universe. The central question of the earlier version — “Will this prince be a fitting ruler?”— in the later version becomes “Is the human being a fitting caretaker of the universe?”