PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘War and Pieces’ Fitfully Considers Society’s Collective Death Wish

“War and Pieces,” at LACE Saturday evening, was a performance art parlor trick: Shuffle symbols and pick a meaning, any meaning.

The work of Kraig Grady, Laura McMurray and David Lederer, “War and Pieces” deals metaphors and images like a game of 52-card pick-up, in an ambivalent search for the meaning of death.

In particular, this “mythic opera of future nostalgia” confronts the collective death wish of our apparent desire for environmental suicide. It is all process and no resolution, of course, despite the earnestness of the final confrontation of character and author--yes, it’s that glib, hip, cynical and insecure, all at once--in a parable of desperate creature and ineffectual creator.

The method in the madness of this one-ring circus of the absurd is parody, the safe side of seriousness. Representing military-industrial caricatures are Aaron Osborne’s scene-chewing, Brandoesque Gen. Tequila y Mota and Roger Mexico’s nerdy science-avatar Neal Cassava. Moderating their conflicts are Patti Peck’s garish Gypsy Madame Spiral, and a multipurpose chorus of Muses dressed like bag-ladies on holiday.

The text--usually declaimed loudly and none too clearly--draws heavily on Biblical allusions and New Age mythologies. Nothing in this “opera” is sung, save one oppressively chanted chorus.

There is strong music in the background, however, taking its cues from the text. Using mostly home-made Orff instruments and reed organs, Grady manages to enrich the texture of the effort and extend its impact through a few acoustically rich, effectively simple chords.

There is also a film as continual backdrop, mirroring the General and Cassava at the beginning, then turning to pictures of earth, air, fire and water. It adds another dimension to the endearing and deliberate amateurishness of the production, but in the end it is only the urgent sincerity of Cassava’s pleading that belatedly turns “War and Pieces” from an exercise in communal solipsism into a pointed acknowledgement of universal conflicts.