| Sleep With Me is a play with music,
a black comedy set in Hollywood in 1938, the story of a teen age girl’s
sexual awakening in the predatory world of 1930’s Hollywood, with
songs ripped out of Shirley Temple’s movies and surgically crafted
into the corrupt adult environment of the film industry.
In the depths of the Depression, Louis B. Mayer, at the height of his powers as the studio chief of MGM, desperately wants Shirley Temple for the role of Dorothy in the Wizard Of Oz. But Mayer has not counted on Melody Mudd, a sixteen year old girl on the cusp of womanhood, Beulah Mudd, her wily and determined stage mother and Billy Bone, Beulah’s boyfriend, a charming hillybilly and eccentric dancer. Sleep With Me is a devious black comedy on the subject of adolescent and adult sexuality and unconscious desire. The play’s use of music is striking in that songs crafted for Shirley Temple by the master’s of Tin Pan Alley are reinvented here as they are sung by adults in very adult situations. The results are ironic and dramatic. Where is the boundary between adolescence and adulthood?
Where is the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious? Where
is the boundary between romance and indecency? These are questions Sleep
With Me explores with a shameless lack of decorum. |