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Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk;
Section E; Part 1 PANIC!
The decor has changed a bit since this
time last year. There are playing cards on the walls now and an army of
dolls with long golden curls on the ceiling. But in many ways, the old place
looks the same -- creepy, disorienting and astonishingly familiar.
It's both somewhere you would never consider
living and somewhere you have lived all your life. Yes, you are back in
Richard Foreman's dream house, one of the prime pieces of
surreal estate in Manhattan.
Every winter Mr. Foreman, who has been
practicing his particular, highly potent brand of theatrical witchcraft
for more than three decades, reassembles his idea of the interior of the
human mind in the tiny Ontological Theater space at St. Mark's Church. And
every winter pilgrims of the avant-garde show up for a dose of senses-scrambling
spectacle, much as other people attend the Christmas show at Radio City
Music Hall. Like their Midtown counterparts Mr. Foreman's fans are rarely
disappointed.
The title of the new show that officially
opened last night is ''Panic! (How to Be Happy!).'' The promise within the
parentheses is deceptive, of course. ''Panic!'' is filled with all sorts
of wise-sounding statements, often spoken in sepulchral voice-overs by Mr.
Foreman, which have the tantalizing quality of phrases half-remembered from
dreams.
There are dotted lines and strings segmenting
the play's ornate puzzle of a set, suggesting there must be some assured
ordering principle at work, if you could only figure it out. But the disconnected,
questing characters in ''Panic!'' end up as bewildered and hopeful as they
begin. Such, in Mr. Foreman's world, is life: one long comedy of exasperation.
There are four main performers in ''Panic!,''
attired in ways that bring to mind a nightmare version of ''The Pirates
of Penzance.'' The men (Robert Cucuzza and D. J. Mendel) look like music
hall brigands; the women (Tea Alagic and Elina Lowensohn) like mangled variations
on the standard Victorian virgin and vamp.
A chorus of battered refugee types move
in hieroglyphic formation and rearrange the strange, bulky objects that
might be called, for want of a better word, furniture.
Human eroticism, a dominant aspect of
Mr. Foreman's work in recent years, is given especially literal-minded representation
here, as the men and women couple like colliding trucks and probe one another
with swords. The oversized phallic and vaginal symbols (the latter accessorized
with a flitting giant bee) suggest the work of an overzealous sex-education
teacher, though ''Panic!'' is perhaps not the show for introducing children
to the facts of life.
Not that the play makes the pursuit of
carnal pleasure seem remotely rewarding. The impeccably precise principal
players, who move and speak with the mannered zeal of automatons in search
of their inner humanity, clearly get no satisfaction from sex. They seem
rather lonely, actually, though not entirely despairing.
''This is my ticket to a better life,''
says one of the women in a whisper filled with great expectations. The men
keep on trying to climb a mountain (that's right) at the back of the stage
even though they always fall from their ropes. And everyone responds happily
to the arrival of unsightly comestibles like a ravaged Miss Havisham-style
wedding cake and some fungoid substance identified as bread. ''Here's tomorrow's
baked goods,'' explains the voice-over on several occasions, ''stale already.''
Another repeated statement, delivered
in a Mickey Mouse falsetto and spliced by a wide pause: ''Let's all join
. . . the misfit club.'' In ''Panic!,'' even more than in most Foreman productions,
it feels as if the world is made up of nothing but misfits, that no one
is meant to find a comfortable niche in a life that will always thwart and
confound.
That Mr. Foreman always extracts such
joyous showmanship from this gloomy premise is one of the continuing miracles
of contemporary New York theater. ''A new perspective can only repeat old
patterns,'' says the voice-over in ''Panic!'' While this may be true, Mr.
Foreman's continuing shift of perspectives, unlike tomorrow's baked goods,
never feels stale.
PANIC! (HOW TO BE HAPPY!)
Written, directed and designed by Richard
Foreman; stage manager, Evan Cabnet; assistant stage manager, Joshua
Briggs; technical director, Michael Darling; sound and lights by Mr. Foreman;
costumes by Kasia Walicka Maimone; assistant costume designer, Kathrine
Wong. Presented by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. At St. Mark's Church,
131 East 10th Street, East Village.
WITH: D. J. Mendel (Nikos), Elina Lowensohn
(Luminitza), Tea Alagic (Svetlana) and Robert Cucuzza (Umberto).
Photo: D. J. Mendel, left, and Robert Cucuzza, appearing in the Ontological-Hysteric
Theater's production of ''Panic!'' by Richard Foreman. (Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times)
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