STAGE REVIEW : ‘Phantom Limbs’ Offers Vision of Mystery and Poetic Fantasy

Too often, plays that contain mysteries--of the mind and spirit, not whodunits--give them up to the audience, reasoning that to do otherwise is a cheat. Often, though, the opposite is true. The puzzle can be what draws an audience in; puzzle-minded playwrights succeed best when they’re not solution-minded.

Such a playwright is Charles Borkhuis. You could summarize his “Phantom Limbs,” at the Wallenboyd, as the story of three male terrorists, holed up in a box-filled warehouse, hiding from a seemingly all-powerful police state and waiting for their female partner, Nina (Elicia Laport). But to do so would be like calling “Ulysses” the story of a day in the life of a Dublin man. You’d be leaving out what only the playing reveals: the seductive power of poetic fantasy.

Borkhuis may not be Joyce, but he is that rare American playwright following in Joyce’s tradition, part of which is a lifelong commitment to the avant-garde.

Borkhuis is part of the New York-based “post-Imagists” group (“Imagists” having been such visually virtuosic directors as Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman) concerned, in Borkhuis’ words, with how “character grows out of the permutations of language and, just as easily, disappears back into the ground of language.”

Language, as evidenced by “Phantom Limbs,” of rich construction, for audiences who listen. This isn’t word play, either. Will (Richard Frank) says to his partner on the lam, Martin (Eric Tull): “One must make plans, Martin. Otherwise the future will be at our throat.” Martin hears a different view from his father disguised in a dogface mask (Gary Guidinger): “People think they choose their own futures. But in fact it’s being sold to them at a profit.”

Two passing remarks, but with much going on underneath. The present is so awful that tomorrow is the only thing to hang on to. Roles constantly switch: The partner says what fathers are supposed to say, and the father sounds like a cynic who’s shed all revolutionary zeal--like a terrorist who feels more a criminal than a soldier in the people’s army (Borkhuis has also read his Pinter and Chekhov). Will’s remark, stemming from the paranoia consuming the characters, generates the belief that your enemies (the police outside) are more powerful than they really are. The father is talking about himself: He sells “wonder drugs” and “dream cassettes.”

“Phantom Limbs” unexpectedly emerges as a vitally fresh contribution to science-fiction theater, dramatizing a world of vanquished freedom and the measures people take to escape from it. Dropping wonder drugs may not be wise, and Martin may be half-cracked to think that everyone outside the warehouse has been replaced with a clone, but those things are understandable given the terror outside the warehouse walls. Dreaming might be the best defense.

Part of that felt terror comes from Michael Arabian’s muscular direction and actors who send out the thousand-yard stare of the war-weary. Frank and Tull hauntingly suggest two sides of the same man: Frank as the group leader losing his mind, Tull as the man of action in the group, now confined to cooking up schemes on his typewriter. James Siering cuts between them with comic aplomb as Victor, the trio’s realist. Guidinger’s father/Dogman adds real menace; Ruth M. Harrison’s mother/Birdwoman adds little.

Arabian, with his technical collaborators (R. S. Hoyes’ brilliant lights, Stephen Glassman and Ajax Daniels’ continually surprising set, Robyn Reichek’s often hilarious costumes, Alex Wright’s bloodcurdling sound design and Di Piepol’s dream-inducing slide projections), puts us in a universe that’s part “Repo Man,” part Aldous Huxley and all theater. The crude introductory video is best missed (don’t miss, though, the mannequin sitting in an aisle seat). With this show, Arabian has become an outstanding director who can put a vision on a stage.

Performances are at 301 Boyd St., Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through April 2. Tickets: $10; (213) 629-2205.