STAGE REVIEW : ‘LOST CONTINENT’: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Performance art and the one-man show are the theatrical forms that have shown the most energy in the last couple of years, not only because, generally speaking, they’re cheaper to produce (no small consideration in an economically beleaguered art), but because we’ve come to a point in American history where we’ve just about lost the ability to experience things firsthand.

That is to say, movies and video images, stereo or compact-disc recordings, advertising, newspeak, psychobabble and the mass media, in bringing us the world, also stand between us and our raw experience of it. (Millions of people know Van Gogh, but how many have stood before a Van Gogh painting?)

Most of what we see in performance art is an attempt to bring that multiplicity back down to the scale of the individual, or at least come to grips with it in a personal way, as is the case with Donald Krieger’s “The Lost Continent,” one of the trio of performance pieces playing under the rubric “Roadshows.”

“The Lost Continent” is a 90-minute-or-so piece that makes use of film, still photos, synthesizer music, vocal music, dance movement and speech. The program notes suggest that “Lost Continent” treats a heroic American myth whose day has come and gone, but Krieger is too subtle, or perhaps too coy, to suggest anything quite so specific.

It opens with Noreen Hennessy and Kristian Hoffman looking through telescopes in one direction, and Krieger, a blond, boyish-looking, slightly jug-eared young man, looking in another. The image leads him to a discourse on the paradox of how a telescope can, in one respect, do so much to enhance vision, yet in another, impose an extreme limit on the direction the viewer’s vision takes.

That’s the first of numerous observations from Krieger’s tirelessly hypothetical and sometimes intriguing mind. Among other things, he touches on time, memory, the curious juxtaposition of affluent suburban America and starvation-ridden Africa, aesthetic reflections “at the tip of an iceberg,” disquisitions on themes of models (“optimistic impermanence” is his particularly cutting phrase for current Americana), the virus (a very well-done segment where we see a metaphor for ambition drilling into the DNA) and technology gone berserk (cordless telephones spontaneously dialing 911, causing the police confusion--one of a number of William Burroughs’ touches).

The randomness of Krieger’s presentation is one of the elements that makes “The Lost Continent” dispiriting, however. The show has a lot of parts that never assemble into a whole (the audience was lost enough to applaud at a blackout several minutes before the show was over, thinking it had ended), and his benign, MacLuhanesque posturing grows wearisome. There’s a good deal of difference between knowledge, of which Krieger has plenty, and wisdom, which is plenty lacking here. (“It’s 1:50. Do you know where your self-concept is?” is a line he’ll wince at five years from now.)

Your reviewer might have adopted more of “The Lost Continent’s” abstruse parts as an article of faith had Krieger (a) given the appearance that he knew what he was doing, and (b) done it well. He has a benign voice for the stage (easily drowned out when the synthesizer comes on) and no performance skills (the same is true for Hoffman, who also contributes a score heavily freighted with plaintive post-’60s slop lyrics). Hennessy, who is a trained performer, can’t help but appear contrastingly strident--her discipline gives her an energy that can’t be muted; she nearly blows Krieger and Hoffman’s wimpy presences off the stage.

The choreography is plain silly, the screen isn’t always clear and the occasional on-screen misspelling ( simulcra for simulacra ) points to the triumph of self-infatuation over a more objective scrutiny of how the program will be presented.

The “Roadshows” series and a lot of the performance art going on right now need encouragement, or at least attention, for their potential in breaking the aesthetic and commercial logjam that has so much of the theater locked in. But while it’s true the artist’s first responsibility is to the fulfillment of his vision, it isn’t necessarily decadent or bourgeois of an audience to expect something for the time and money it spends believing itself to be another object of the artist’s responsibility. When art goes public, it entails a pact.

At the Cast (800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, (213) 462-0265), 8 p.m., through Sunday; moves Wednesday to the Powerhouse in Santa Monica, and on Sept. 10 to LACE Gallery for five performances.