Night Coil
For Jones, everyday reality is simply too boring to bother with. His most polemical work–and his best known in Chicago, where it’s been a perennial October favorite–is Seventy Scenes of Halloween, a series of blackouts in no particular order showing a young middle-class couple at home on Halloween. Here “reality” is represented by a constant stream of disjointed images and white noise from the couple’s TV–a reality that’s as skin-deep as the facade of white-bread suburban bliss in this 1980 anti-Reagan diatribe.
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Jones’s bleak, Kafkaesque fever dream Night Coil–first staged two years before Seventy Scenes of Halloween–bends the space-time continuum even further: this is a test of wills between the ego and the id that takes place entirely within the realm of the subconscious. The setting challenges the audience from the start, and Jones’s script takes snippets of Hamlet’s “To die, to sleep / To sleep: perchance to dream” soliloquy and turns them into a series of non sequiturs. There’s no question this is a potent theatrical exercise, but it lacks the comic touches and clarity of Jones’s later works, not only Seventy Scenes but the trilogy “A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones.”
In the end, Night Coil attacks the failures of Jungian dream interpretation more than it celebrates it, as Jones exposes how rational analysis ultimately suppresses the creative instincts and limits the myriad possibilities that dreams represent. The Young Man and His Double encounter a number of dream figures who reinforce this attack. Three policemen (all dressed in three-piece suits) are repressive authority figures while a singing tramp and an idealistic ingenue push the Young Man and his doppelganger to reinterpret their surroundings. And the crux of Night Coil is the potential destruction of creativity: the Young Man feels a murderous hatred for His Double, who’s able to perceive things he cannot.
