PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘The Mission Lights’ at the Basement Theatre

“The Mission Lights” was the first offering of the La Canada Player’s “Alternative Stage” program for so-called experimental / avant-garde works. But there was nothing experimental about writer-director Nastasha Eve’s performance art work, performed Friday through Sunday at the Basement Theatre in Pasadena.

Street-clothed performers appeared singly, in pairs and in a group of five, in static stagings of spoken free verse and realistic dialogue.

Sometimes these three women and two men remained silent as their lines played over the speaker system, but that’s as far as the production strayed from traditional theater or recital techniques.

The 11 sketches--built around such tired topics as the search for self and replete with cloying, rhetorical questions and stale imagery--may have been derived from the author’s diary or a similar source. (A sample title tells all: “My Innermost Thoughts.”)

The one exception to this tedium was an absurdist vignette entitled “What If?” in which performers wearing white lab coats paced in interlocking circles while pondering existential possibilities. Piquant xylophone accompaniment scored the Ionesco-like scenario.

Little effort was made to connect the skits to one another, with blackouts serving as segues. Recorded interludes of KFWB News 98 radio broadcasts were played during a few of these transitions, but it was a slapped-on attempt at implying a less-than-original shared theme: the trials and tribulations of ‘80s life.

Piano accompaniment, written by Eve, provided texture to the otherwise one-dimensional material, although often the performers couldn’t be heard over the music.

“Mission Lights” was performed by an ensemble of apparent neophytes given to mumbling their lines and fidgeting in place: Bruce Allen Buonauro, Gregory A. Chandler, Debbie Fike, Astral Kolence and Eve.