STAGE REVIEW : ‘UNWRAPPING’ BOUND BY LOOSE CONNECTIONS

The closing segment of the MOCA/Pipeline Angel’s Flight series at the Wallenboyd recently offered “The Unwrapping,” a work-in-progress by Donald Krieger and master puppeteer Bruce D. Schwartz. It was not advertised as a work-in-progress. It just turned out that way.

Schwartz is a remarkable artist and his effects in this collaboration with Krieger (a first) were as memorable as the ones in “Personal Effects” and earlier shows.

Very rocky here were bridges and transitions that randomly tossed “The Unwrapping” from modern-day America to mystical Ancient Egypt. The former ranged from banal to funny, the latter from magical to mysterious, but the twain had a helluva time meeting--when they met at all.

Plots--several--were the weakest aspects of the event. They connected only under duress. Visual effects (a great deal of skillful trompe l’oeil ) were the strongest components, but they came laboriously, scene by scene, instead of running smoothly.

“The Unwrapping” (which has everything to do with unraveling mummies--or is it our souls? . . . ) started out as a lecture demonstration by one Ranger Don (Donald Krieger) at Grand Canyon Park, showing us tourists a cross section of a tree going back thousands of years--to Ancient Egypt.

The next scene, for no particular reason, jumped us to the bedroom of a teen-age boy (Steven Tash) reluctantly doing his homework. He was studying--would you believe?--Ancient Egypt. It fascinated him to the point that he was “transported” to its realms, although not nearly soon enough.

If this feels like a lame excuse to take us back in time, it was. “The Wizard of Oz” it was not, but the principle was roughly the same-- roughly being the operative word.

The wizard here was Schwartz, and when the show relied on him, complaints were minimal. His work was as superior as ever, but seriously underrehearsed. Ancient Egypt provides abundant design magic, and golden goddesses floating through time and space in golden boats are impossible to resist.

Mummified sacred cats doing a dance of collision does border on the ludicrous, but the weighing of a human heart against a sacred feather on heavenly scales stayed with you long after the silliness of some the dialogue had blissfully vanished. And the unraveling of one mummy and wrapping of another, like thread transposed from one spool to another, was an exceptional visual moment, even if you were not at all sure what it meant. The continuity of death, perhaps?

Too much of “The Unwrapping” felt just this arbitrary and uncoordinated, chopped up by lengthy blackouts, its gentle ironies and satire intermittently bludgeoned by Krieger’s sly but too often leaden humor (example: “The Egyptian version of hell was dark and cold--sort of like Encino”).

If the earthly Krieger and ethereal Schwartz ever find a way to make their widely differing styles coalesce, this could become a show. At the moment, the prospects seem dim. Still, if they can get Kristian Hoffman (who also played a life-size mummy with a captivating mix of delicacy and despair) to expand his plaintive original musical score, who knows? They may yet find a way to pull it off.