STAGE REVIEW : GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF ‘BELOW MIDDLE SEA’

As one who enjoys watching fish make their unhurried rounds behind plate glass, I had a good time at Mimi Seton’s “See Below Middle Sea” at Taper, Too. An hour of it was enough, though.

This is a sound/movement/light show that puts the viewer at the bottom of the ocean, where the starfish creep and the dolphins play. Dancers in one-piece costumes are the fish, moving to crystalline sounds from above, or singing their own wordless madrigals-- la, la, chirk, chirk . (Seton composed the music; Eddie Glickman was choreographer.)

The water is evoked by Liz Stillwell’s lighting. Sometimes it’s clear, sometimes it’s milky. (As in an early scene where we spy two dim figures who might be Eve and Adam reborn under the sea--this, before we have begun to read the dancers as ocean creatures.) Always we sense the atmosphere in motion, an effect enhanced by dancing slide projections.

But the projections, by Craig Collins, aren’t literal. This is a theater piece, not “The World of Jacques Cousteau.” We are visiting the ocean’s floor realm in imagination, much as we visited the underworld of Hieronymus Bosch in Martha Clark’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at the Doolittle Theatre--a production that may have given Seton some ideas.

But where Bosch’s world was hell, this one is more like heaven. The general activity is free play to music. Figures cluster and meld, or do sportive little solos, or whisk offstage with a flip of the tail. (Again, it is an imagined tail--no Walt Disney cuteness here.)

Very pleasant, all this, but a little bland. Is there no pain in this world? Seton does little with violence--the staple of the undersea film and of nature films in general.

There is a section towards the end where the creatures seem to prey on one another. But we usually see them as benign, almost to the point of being angelic. (There is a theory, I seem to recall, about dolphins being agents of a higher power.)

The danger comes from above. When a ship passes over, its sounds send shock waves through them, as if the water had been electrified. Worse, a net might come down, setting the stage for a kind of crucifixion. Such is the climax of the piece.

Seton also includes a narration which allows us to see this ocean as a metaphor for the tides of the human body. Deafness becomes a sub theme, and a solitary dancer seems to embody the isolation of the deaf person from the herd. The nexus between marine life and terrestrial handicaps isn’t really established, however, and the piece becomes muddy for trying to be too inclusive.

Its basic problem, however, is that it goes on about 10 minutes too long--not to the point of being tedious, but to the point of no longer being fresh. We have enjoyed its calm movements and its engaging sound patterns (for which credit musical director David Anglin), and we have read its message as clearly as we are going to, and now we are ready for it to be over.

Luckily, this happens before claustrophobia sets in. “See Below Middle Sea” is a charming conceit. It just needs to return the viewer to the surface a little sooner.

“Lady Beth” was what the workers called the Vernon plant of the Bethlehem Steel Co., which shut down for good three years ago. It is also the title of a theater piece written and performed by six of these men, which can be seen at Mondays-Wednesdays at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford St. (213) 466-2226.

The liberal in me says that attention must be paid to what these workers have to say about how they were discarded. The theater critic in me says that this piece is rudimentary in the extreme. Its value is that it serves as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the closing of this particular plant, and of what that says about of the decline of American industry during the 1980s. The evening starts at 8.

‘SEE BELOW MIDDLE SEA’ Mimi Seton’s music-dance piece at Taper, Too. Director Seton. Choreographer Eddie Glickman. Musical director David Anglin. Set design Nancy Seruto. Costume design Sylvia Moss. Lighting design Liz Stillwell. Slide projections and photography Craig Collins. Production stage manager Mireya Heoner. Musicians Anglin, Gloria Cheng, M. B. Gordy III. With Tony Abatemarco, Tony Duran, Dasietta Kim, Susan Kohler, Roxanne Mayweather, Deborah Nishimura, Graciela Onetto, William Pasley, Gregory Thirloway, Bradd Wong. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30. John Anson Ford Cultural Center, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. (213) 410-1062.