STAGE REVIEW : A Stylish ‘La Nik a Wet’ by Belgian Artists

The stage is set with metal washtubs, twisted pipe, dented trash cans, funnels and stray bits of gutter. This gray universe of discards is artfully arranged, implying purposeful if deliberate neglect.

In the penumbra, human arms begin a slow percussive tapping from behind one heap. Slowly, the tapping drums into a roar and a voice like a demented muezzin, explodes in a wordless chant of clear, arresting tones.

That’s the start of the Belgian Theatre de Banlieue’s latest two-character piece, “La Nik a Wet,” a Pipeline presentation at the Odyssey Theatre. Loosely translated, the title is “Nik and Wet,” as in Vladimir and Estragon. Or Winnie and Willy. Once again, we’re plunged into the Beckett post-Apocalypse of “Happy Days” or “Waiting for Godot.”

Isabelle Lamouline is Nik. Alain Mebirouk is Wet. (Some may remember them from “Aqui No Se Rinde,” the last Theatre de Banlieue show presented in Los Angeles by Pipeline in 1988.) The twilight zone they seem to be stranded in here is a copper and rust and galvanized metal no-man’s-land, an aural and visual sculpture that moves, makes sounds, shatters, recombines, breaks apart, reveals, congeals.

La Nik is a handsome woman in immediate danger of becoming the Tin Woman, weighted down as she is by assorted receptacles. Wet enters the playing area draped in black and burdened by metal detritus. He looks like some formidable reject or refugee from Genghis Khan’s army. “It is forbidden to place garbage on a public thoroughfare” is the first coherent line out of his mouth, as he raids the jolly junkyard to skillfully rearrange it.

From this point on the Theatre’s 70-minute piece becomes at once engaging and predictable. Wet and la Nik, like some desperate Boesman and Lena, give voice if not language to their failed communication. (They are, says Mebirouk in some press notes, “lives in a growing state of decomposition.”)

Props become saxophones; props become costume. Macabre quasi-dances look like the final spasms of retarded children. Intelligible sentences fly from their lips now and then, but suspended in the air, addressed to no one (if not, from time to time, to us, the audience) and rarely in a sequence that illuminates meaning.

They are people on parallel inarticulate tracks, missing each other at every turn, relying on utterred or percussive sound more than on words, on action and facial expression. What they do for this pain-driven hour is rummage around the junkyard of their souls as much as in this depository of human manufacture that has grown useless and redundant in the dying world.

The message is not new and was, we are told, wrought by Lamouline and Mebirouk in improvisations during daily nine-hour rehearsals for five months-- before the world decided upon healing itself, which makes it more possible to receive this show at half an arm’s length.

Overworked as it may be, however, it doesn’t diminish the physical size and caliber of this pair’s achievement. These astonishing artists have devised an urgent and eloquent theatrical semaphore with which to remind us, like tortured, spastic mutants, that post-nuclear winters are still only one malevolent breath or accident away.

Finer points of interpretation will of necessity remain mysterious and subjective--up to each individual--but the collective consciousness cannot escape the doomsday warning that even the new climate of optimism cannot nullify.

For sheer mastery of craft, these artists are not to be missed.

At the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. in West Los Angeles, Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday 10:30 p.m., with a final performance Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets: $12; (213) 477-2055.