wish-fulfillment fantasy

Being a professional narratologist, a scholar of mythic genres and archetypes, she knows that every wish-fulfillment fantasy — including the one she now finds herself in — is essentially a cautionary tale, a reminder that life’s shortcuts often result in a life cut short.

Eric John Meyer’s “The Antelope Party,” a presentation of the Dutch Kills Theater Company that had its New York premiere recently at the Wild Project, uses a classic movie thriller structure to explore the potential real-world dangers of wish-fulfillment fantasy groups.

Bob Odenkirk makes a disastrous turn as an assassin-turned-nice-guy-turned-assassin-again in a role that’s all macho wish-fulfillment fantasy.

But there’s a lack of a comparable fluidity here; the show often feels tonally stranded between wish-fulfillment fantasy and dream-crushing naturalism.

Although most of the particulars of Francis’s story are true in “The Two Popes,” and he did write to Benedict asking to retire, the ballast of the film — the funny, thoughtful, sincere and ultimately reconciling conversations between two ideological opposites — might best be interpreted as McCarten’s wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the two men embody a church he wants to see evolve, despite threats of schism and self-destructive hypocrisy.