STAGE REVIEW : Dario D’Ambrosi Casts a One-Man Fantasy With ‘Trout’

Italy’s Dario d’Ambrosi is back and he’s at it again. Not that he visits often. In fact, not often enough. But he’s back at Stages Trilingual Theatre doing his amazing, unnerving thing: Giving us undecorated slices of life in a mental patient’s internal world, as observed by him in the psychiatric hospital of Rome’s Santa Maria della Pieta.

Stop. That’s only partially accurate. His latest piece, “La Trotta” (“The Trout”), which opened Tuesday, is actually part observation, part pure flight of fancy. Just like “Nemico Mio” (“Enemy of Mine”), the piece d’Ambrosi brought to Stages in December, 1988, and again last week, it focuses on a man obsessed with his body and bodily functions, but also with the image of a fish--the trout of the title--and his inability to kill it.

Just exactly how real this trout is, one can’t tell--any more than just exactly where this man is that d’Ambrosi plays. The “room” he lives in could be a sidewalk cardboard shack, a cell in a mental institution, perhaps a real room. But there’s no question that the fellow is riddled with physical and psychological tics, and that we’re taken in and out of reality during d’Ambrosi’s hourlong monologue.

It begins innocuously enough, with the man sitting in a chair trying to mend a broken plate. He talks, to no one in particular. It’s a ramble filled with astute observations. He has an aching tooth and eventually, he pulls it--with a string tied to his chair.

There is great reverence and humor here--a reverence for life, for its minutiae, for body parts. Such as pulled teeth. “Why don’t we have a cemetery for the teeth?” he asks in irresistible broken English sparked with occasional Italian, as he plunges into a delicious dissertation on the possibilities of such a place.

“There lie the molars of Giovanni Franceschini,” he intones, visualizing the grave with glee. “Here lie the teeth of the entire Canalotti family.” Just think, he adds, positively transported with pleasure, you could go visit .

Now why didn’t anyone else think of that? D’Ambrosi goes on to propose that we set up similar graveyards for arms and legs and other losable parts of the body. He also rhapsodizes on the joys of defecation, but so artfully that, while sacrificing nothing of an ultra-graphic reality that borders dangerously on bad taste, he averts both offense and grotesquerie. The same applies to a barely verbal but explicit sexual sequence. These are molto grandi risks he excels at--and that takes plenty of talent.

What, do you say, does any of this have to do with a trout? We’re just getting to that. Mental patients tend to be intensely involved with their bodies, and another intense physical process is the ingestion of food. When this man decides he’s hungry, it’s specific. He determines he wants a nice fresh fish for dinner--and goes after one.

From this point on, reality and fantasy blur. He buys a fish--either for real or in his imagination, we’ll never know. He puts it in a sink filled with water and, lo and behold, the fish is so fresh that it lives! Now that’s a problem.

How does a man eat a fish without killing it, which, after a couple of abortive attempts, he decides he would rather not do? Well, he might try to get someone else to kill it for him (no luck) or he might try to talk the fish into committing suicide (again, no luck). It doesn’t occur to him to take the fish out of water.

What occurs to him instead is to dive into the pool. Suddenly we’re submerged in total surreality, and man and fish are swimming together underwater with a rather finite fishy finish for the man.

Clever idea, yes, but disappointingly executed at the bitter end, where a rudimentary set by Jim Sweeters crudely devaluates the soaring notion behind it.

It’s doubly too bad because, up to that point, the show, as confined and narrow as it is, is quite a magnificent personal feat.

One suggestion for the actor: No need for goggles or a snorkel if the idea is that the man is totally underwater. A snorkel serves no purpose and goggles are gratuitous since we are firmly in a floating realm of the imagination here.

And it’s an exceptional imagination that deserves now to break out into other material. Not because d’Ambrosi doesn’t do this material superlatively, but because one is curious to see what else he holds in store. “La Trotta” is as close to performance art as theater gets. And while it is a redoubtable piece of acting, it also remains a curio, and--in the end certainly--a slightly frustrating fishtail.

At 1540 N. McCadden Place , Hollywood, tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m., with a final matinee Sunday at 3. $20; (213) 463-5356.