THEATER REVIEW : ‘Slow Fire’s’ Brilliant Sparks Produce No Flame

The journey home can prove a perilous enterprise. As Homer’s Odysseus slowly and painfully learned, there are sirens, whirlpools and one-eyed giants waiting to pounce on the unwary traveler.

When civilizations began to assume an increasingly large role in protecting their members, the physical tribulations of the wanderer began to make way for more detailed descriptions of emotional and spiritual terrors. Hence, the road Odysseus began to walk leads to Virgil’s Aeneas and Milton’s Jesus in “Paradise Regained.”

Although the world may never be a completely safe place, the comforts of modern technology are undoubtedly largely responsible for creating the climate that fostered James Joyce’s “Ulysses”--the ultimate, internal homage to the Homeric model.

“Slow Fire,” a unique synthesis of electronic rock opera and performance art by the collaborative team behind the Paul Dresher Ensemble, is one of the newest travelers on this road--and it is a remarkably charged sensory and psychological one.

Two years ago, a work-in-progress version of “Slow Fire” previewed at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. In the current full-length version playing at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts through Sunday, “Slow Fire” tackles the tale of an Everyman, Bob, who is struggling to assemble an identity for himself through recollections of conversations with his father and the admonishing voices of the advertisements around him.

It’s a fractured, cubist odyssey, with actor-singer-writer Rinde Eckert taking on the voices of Bob and his Willy Loman-like father. Eckert is flanked on stage by Dresher, the composer, on guitar, keyboard and electronics, and by Gene Riffkin on percussion. He flows from operatic tenor to speech as he moves from father and son driving on the highway to shooting duck decoys to Bob scavenging the newspaper for the “Living” section with the anxiety of one looking for clues in the murky dark.

Sound innocent? No more than childhood itself--not when you put together the manic movements and exhortations of Eckert with the densely layered music.

The taut direction of Richard E. T. White, an experienced Shakespearean director, rides the multifaceted show like a seasoned racing jockey atop the youngest, fastest and most spirited of thoroughbreds. The sounds of the live multitrack recording, which mixes and chops the complex composition, weave around the melodic monologue like a braid of exposed, writhing nerves, sometimes chiming, sometimes whooshing and often relentlessly tick-tick-ticking--much in the spirit of a cobra-like world curling around the prey of a trembling soul.

“Slow Fire” is no easier to follow than Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The form, such as it is, is a stream of consciousness on the attack, with the vignettes spraying up like red sparks under the hammer pounding a blacksmith’s anvil.

The sparks are beautiful to the senses: from Eckert’s exquisitely powerful performance--he moves in a green jump suit with graceful turns and leaps that seem to defy any limitations--to the set of versatile blank screens and squares, of which Eckert’s bald pate and bare hands and feet seem just another canvas for Larry Neff’s brilliant lighting brush.

Eckert’s script also shimmers, sending up a flood of wordplay that moves from the tortured weight of cliches running together--”A rolling stone . . . is where the heart is . . . if you get out of the kitchen”--to the plaintive query of a son to his father on the road, operatically sung: “What state are we in now, Dad?” (At one point the answer is California, to which the son responds, panicked, “Keep driving.” At another, the father answers “Real estate”--bringing us around to the ‘80s.)

It all builds to a nightmarish intensity, with the voices of Bob’s father as the sirens, the lure of materialistic advertisements the whirlpools and the seductive lure of his father’s loaded duck gun the Cyclops.

Unfortunately, unlike the classic “Odyssey,” the parts are more satisfying than the whole, and the ending trails off rather than completing the circle.

In “Slow Fire,” the Paul Dresher Ensemble has shown it can take the discordia concordis of ballet and jazz, opera and rock, the explosive freedom of performance art and the elegant discipline of Shakespearean control and rub them all together to make a splendid and stirring blaze.

But is there a heart at the center of it all? It’s hard to tell through the clever pyrotechnics of the flames.

“SLOW FIRE”

Director is Richard E. T. White. Music by Paul Dresher. Text by Rinde Eckert. Lighting by Larry Neff. Audio engineer is Jay Cloidt. With Rinde Eckert. At 8 p.m. today and 7 p.m. Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts, La Jolla.