STAGE REVIEW : ‘Reconstructing From Memory’ Those Hazy Interior Excursions

All theater pieces are assemblages, arrangements of particulars into a whole. The time-favored form (and still champion) is the story, where event A triggers event B.

Experimental pieces often follow a more subjective order. Event A can be followed by event Q. The audience is to go with the flow.

That demands that there be a flow. Chicago theater maker Michael Kalmes Meyers provided one over the weekend at the LACE Gallery with his “Reconstructing (the Temple) From Memory.”

What Meyers is getting at in this piece is hazy, probably even to him. It has something to do with the equal claims of the past and the future on our attention.

But there was nothing hazy about Sunday night’s performance. Each tableau was in focus, each transition was clean, each light change was precise (lighting designer Lou Mallozzi also did the original music), and each word was given its proper value.

Withal, the tone was relaxed. Meyers was the narrator, walking us through a series of vignettes that probably had more resonance for him than for us. (The temple in the title is his own head.)

There was a conversation about how the wind in the alley was raising the lids on the garbage cans. That sounded like memory, something that a child might hear from the front room as he was falling asleep and, for some reason, never forget. But the scene where the two men kept throwing cards at each other and the final scene where Meyers appeared with his head in a globe were more like dreams.

And the scene where the house collapsed, leaving the man in the doorway intact, was from Buster Keaton.

The viewer perused each vignette with interest, but without tension. It wasn’t like listening to a man unburden himself of some troubling private symbology. It was more like taking a river tour with a guide who spots something new each time out.

The actors were relaxed and themselves, as if they hadn’t been told that this was an avant-garde play. Each stood for some aspect of the narrator--young boy (Darren Willett), young girl (Lauren Joffe), grown man (Mark Nash), grown woman (Vickie Hoch), dreamy old codger (Manny Jacobson), and so forth. One man’s family.

To the side stood Kay Reed, singing “sol-fa”--or was it “so far?” But this speech was perfectly clear: “This is just a life that we live as a demonstration for a life that we’re going to live better next time.”

A theater maker who can assemble a sentence that well knows what he’s doing.

‘RECONSTRUCTING (THE TEMPLE) FROM MEMORY’ Michael Kalmes Meyers’ theater piece, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Presented in partnership with the National Performance Network. Director Meyers. Lighting design and original music Lou Mallozzi. Assistant director Marsha Paludan. Movie Dan Bailey. Performance coordinator Weba Garretson. Technical assistant Doug Nickel. Stage manager/sound Curtis Green. Box office manager Monica Townsend. With Meyers, Mark Nash, Bob Gould, Jay McCormack, Vickie Hoch, Manny Jacobson, Darren Willett, Lauren Joffe, Kay Reed and Elizabeth Pearson.