Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
The stage is dark and the soft, comforting sounds of rain echo through the theater. Two performers slowly emerge into the light and stare out towards the audience, picking apart flowers and letting the pieces drift to the floor.
This was the opening to “bed,” Sid Zhang’s ’25 theater capstone project, which premiered March 6 in the Nitery and played through March 15. A physical, multimedia, one-hour performance, “bed” explored themes of dreams, intimacy and gardening through a combination of unique, experimental elements.
The show took place on a single bed; as the only prop, the bed took up nearly the entire stage. The lack of extraneous set design and constant minimalism throughout the show placed even greater emphasis on the performers: their stories, emotions and narrative arcs enabled intimate exploration of universal themes of the human experience, including longing, fear and what it feels like to dream.
Without any actual dialogue, the actors — Iman Monnoo ’28 and Clément Dieulesaint ’22 M.S. ’24 — expressed emotion without uttering a single word. Maya Green ’25 narrated poetically and sporadically throughout the show. Her musings related to nature and growth, as well as broader, almost metacognitive reflections and questions about storytelling.
The barebones set design also highlighted the show’s physicality. The actors had to be creative with their representations: they went from digging a hole for a tree in the sheets to pillow-fighting to gently falling asleep. The use of physicality as the main form of communication created images that transcended words and left a lasting impression.
One standout feature was the choreography, which was characterized by its fluidity and emotional intensity. Performers eloquently conveyed every emotion, from the vulnerability of sleep to the chaos and wonder of dreams and nightmares. Watching the show, each movement felt intentional, lending a meaningful, seamless feeling to the piece’s narrative flow.
Alongside movement, visual storytelling and an evocative soundscape also shaped the thought-provoking experience. The fusion of immersive, comforting sound and movement invited viewers to not only watch but feel as if they were in a dream state themselves.
Another dream-like element of the show were projections of the two characters seemingly walking further and further into the distance near the end of the show. Zhang said she originally did not like the idea of projections in theater, but she thought it was an interesting opportunity to bring the outdoors to the indoors metaphorically and in a way that smoothly enhanced the narrative.
Zhang said the projections spoke to the “mechanism of dreaming: you don’t know where it comes from. You just know it’s on you, and you cannot really trace its source,” she said. “When you’re dreaming, it’s something irretrievable, it’s something inaccessible from the self when awake.”
Zhang also said she wants to treat “bed” as a work-in-progress. In the future, she may return to the concept of “bed” and explore aspects of the uncanny, intimacy and the symbolism of a bed through a slightly different lens.
By the end of the show, and even now, I am not completely sure what to take away from “bed.” However, I think that’s part of what makes it so interesting and thought-provoking. I fully felt what Zhang described as one of her goals for the production: “to put the audience into some kind of a dream state and to make it hard to tell the dream part of theater and the reality part of theater apart.”
A previous version of this article stated that Zhang narrated the voiceover. Maya Green ’25 narrated the voiceover. The Daily regrets this error.