La vida es sueño.
Welcome to my dream. I say that because as I look back at my life as a playwright seems to have been a dream. It began as the fantasy of a 12-year old. For twenty years, it struggled to take on more tangible form, through reading, acting, getting a BA with a Major in Theatre, and finally, first public exposure through the improvisational West End - The Theatrical Soap Opera. Then there was a decade, from 1985 to 1995, when it all seemed almost real. Almost.
On this website, I want to share with you the plays from that decade, reflections on those plays, some of my current reflections and current work, which still includes writing plays, but focuses on issues of engineering communication related to my current position as a Senior Lecturer in the Engineering Communication Program at the University of Toronto.
The design of this website began in January, 2008 as a project for two teams in Engineering Strategies and Practice, the first year design course in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. The design and implementation of the site continued by Fernando Nogueira in the autumn of that year. It has been completed by Owajigbanam Ogbuluijah. I am grateful to these designers for their inspiring ideas and (equally inspiring) hard work.
A last word - you may have recognized the quote above, La vida es sueño, as the title of the great play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Titles are a remarkable phenomenon. They can be difficult, seemingly impossible sometimes, to find for something you have written. Alternately, you can come up with a great title and then have incredible difficulty writing something worthy of it. It is a tribute to Calderón that his play is as massive, complex and enduring as the title promises. Here is the rest of the quote (please forgive any inaccuracy in my translation below):
¿Qué es la vida?
Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.
What is life?
An illusion a shadow, a fiction,
in which the great is also the insignificant; for all of life is a dream, and dreams are...only dreams.
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca