Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play by the Nobel Prize-winning St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott.
[1] Produced off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1971, it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".
[2] In a review of the Negro Ensemble production in The New Yorker, the journalist Edith Oliver called the play "a masterpiece" and "a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry", noting that "poetry is rare in modern theater.
After being imprisoned for destroying things in a local market, he has a vision in jail of a white goddess, who pushes him to return to Africa.
Reconciled to his actual life, Makak begins calling himself by his real name Felix Hobain and resolves to return home to Monkey Mountain.
Apparition, who represents at different points the moon, a muse, and a white woman or goddess.
After a short epigraph (a quote by Martinican post-colonial political philosopher Frantz Fanon), the play opens with a chorus singing a call-and-response, while dancers cross the stage.
One holds Tigre and Souris, black men in jail for thievery, and the other is empty.
The biracial Corporal Lestrade appears, dragging Makak, an older black man, whom he throws into the empty cell.
Lestrade argues with the other prisoners, whom he views as animals, and then hosts an improvised trial.
Makak remembers a dream in which the apparition of a white woman told him to go back to Africa.
On a country road, Moustique finds a group of people gathered around a sick man.
They light hot coals beneath him, hoping to sweat out the illness caused by a snakebite.
Moustique offers to fetch his friend, a healer, in exchange for bread and money.
Lestrade wakes him, along with Tigre and Souris, who notice that Makak has money and decide to rob him.
Lestrade leads the calls for praise, and the crowd responds jubilantly, but Makak is not happy: He sees himself as a hollow ghost of his old self.