‘Not for Real’ Belies Name, Tickles Minds

How can one theatricalize such an abstract concept as the search for one’s soul?

Leonard Pitt manages the feat in his oddly humorous, poignant and compelling one-man show, “Not for Real,” at Sushi Performance Gallery through Sunday.

Don’t be fooled when Pitt says: “Ideas, ideas are the things that count. Everything else is not for real.” It’s as deceptive as the moment he “eats” his face by slowly consuming the mask he is wearing without a touch of his fingers.

The performance piece--about an hour in length--begins with Pitt as an old man who seems to be dropping crumbs to feed birds, hoping to lure one into a small cage. The emotional thread running throughout is the presence or the absence of the bird, which comes to symbolize hope, once defined by Emily Dickinson as “that thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”

He eventually finds a bird’s egg, which a taped voice suggests represents the soul of one’s ancestors, and begins talking to it about where his own ancestors came from, at first pointing to maps and then reading from books on a table.

He is so thirsty for the ideas in these books, he literally “drinks” them with a straw and, in the process, absent-mindedly knocks the egg, which he had placed in the cage, into the trash basket, never noticing as he sips his fill of adventure, romance and passion.

The greatest problem with this beautifully coordinated show is how easy it is to be distracted by Pitt’s graceful delivery of his clever vignettes and miss the emotional glue that makes the fragments a whole.

From the book sequence, the old man segues into the powerful Louis XIV, the Sun King, who tells the famous fable of the Emperor who gave up his beloved nightingale upon being given a mechanical bird (the ultimate choosing of ideas over reality). He sinks into sickness and despair when the mechanical bird breaks down and the real nightingale is nowhere to be found.

Of course the bird does return, Louis tells us, and all ends happily--until he is contradicted by a voice on his handy tape player that reminds him he had the bird executed for insubordination.

He objects to the charge only to metamorphose into a beautiful young girl, then a salesman who sees all the world’s religions, philosophies and discoveries as business investments, then, finally, back into the lonely, searching old man again.

In the end it is the ideas--about philosophy, religion and power--that play the old man false; the one thing that brings him comfort is the ticklish feeling of a bird’s feather on his aged hands and face.

The painstaking direction by Rinde Eckert, who co-created the piece, plays up the humor and the pain in this complex little production. The original music, by Paul Dresher, helps weave seemingly disparate emotional threads into a single cloth. The artistic design of the simple set, subtly lit by Novella T. Smith, reaches a startling climax with a surprise sculpture piece by Laurie Polster in which the old man is, in the end, literally laid to rest with his ancestors.

But the real reason this show shouldn’t be missed, even by non-philosophers and connoisseurs of performance art, is Pitt himself. He won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for “Not for Real” in 1987, a best actor award from the Academy of Theatre Artists in Chicago in 1988, and is probably a good bet for more honors.

Professionally trained in French mime and Balinese mask theater, Pitt, a founding member of George Coates Performance Works and current co-artistic director of Life on the Water in San Francisco, defies classification. He speaks sometimes, therefore he cannot be a mime. He is too serious for vaudeville, too funny for drama and too eclectic to be pigeonholed as being like anyone but himself.

He takes himself seriously, then undercuts the seriousness; he takes the knowledge necessary to be a philosopher and uses it to mock philosophy from the inside out. So what is left at the end of life but a search for an elusive song, and, perhaps, a show like this one that tickles the mind like the feather found by Pitt’s old man? These questions and others may not be answered, but they are very much for real in this deceptively titled show.

“NOT FOR REAL”

Created by Leonard Pitt and Rinde Eckert. Director, Rinde Eckert. Lighting, Novella T. Smith. Sound, Rinde Eckert. Costumes and props, Melissa Weaver. Map design by Grant Ditzler. Earth cut-out design by Laurie Polster. Original music by Paul Dresher. With Leonard Pitt. At 8 p.m. through Sunday at 852 8th Ave., San Diego. Tickets are $7-$10. (619) 235-8466.