Dreams of Jimmy Bannon

Dreams of Jimmy Bannon is an absurdist comedy set in the dingy New York apartment of the title character, a retired sportswriter. Bannon is interviewed by cub reporter Timothy “Sparky” Jenkins; as impossible events unfold, all sense of reality recedes. Do any of the play’s characters even exist? Or is this just a flash of delirium at the moment of Bannon’s death?

Bannon’s distinctive monologues are like linguistic fractals, punctuated by lucid tragicomic moments in which he apprehends his life simultaneously as terrifying hypocrisy and stark, ineffable beauty. Playwright Jose Rivera has described the play as “hilarious…so damn poetic and beautiful.”

Bannon’s first incarnation was in a feature on the Bonkworld website. Schoneboom started by taking fragments of random sentences by the late real-life sportswriter Jimmy Cannon and fusing them together. Thus Jimmy Bannon emerged with an outrageous language all his own; he makes up for what he lacks in sense by exploding with rhythm, imagery, and pure emotion. In the play Dreams of Jimmy Bannon, he becomes for the first time flesh and blood, taking the stage “like a lunatic dressed like an umpire in a bullfight.”