FESTIVAL ’90 : STAGE REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : ‘Undead’: Icy Poem About Gays

Six haunted young men stalk the stage, driven by their entwined impulses to hold each other and to hit each other.

At “The Undead,” an L.A. Festival presentation at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), it is sex and violence--not love and marriage--that go together like a horse and carriage.

The piece is an icy tone poem, lasting little more than an hour. If it were longer, it would seem repetitious, for its monologues, dialogues and choreographed movement illustrate the frenetic search for contact between these men--no matter what form that contact might take--without arriving at any conclusions.

The text, by novelist Dennis Cooper, sounds like fragments of real speech. Cooper avoids flights into self-conscious lyricism. He also avoids any nods to conventional dramatic structure.

One of the men observes that sex should always be between someone beautiful and someone ugly. If two beautiful people do it, it’s like two mannequins, he says.

The men on stage are not all “beautiful.” But with a couple of exceptions, they are delineated more by physical type than anything else. Because we don’t know much about them beyond type, they sometimes come off as nameless mannequins, modeling Cooper’s attitudes.

The types include a long-haired teen-ager (Scot Goetz), a short black guy (Christopher Blande), a well-muscled narcissist (Steven Craig), and a spiky-looking black-leathered Jayne Mansfield impersonator (Curtis York).

Five of the men are inexplicably attracted to the sixth, Mark (Keith Levy), a skinny dyed-white-blond. But only one of them (Luis Alfaro) really harbors strong feelings about Mark. Mark himself is largely blase about his lovers. His one extended conversation with Alfaro’s character is the comic highlight of a not particularly funny piece; Mark prattles on about using porn actors as role models for passion, not recognizing that he’s speaking to someone who’s obsessed with a real passion for him.

The passion appears in the choreography, by directors Ishmael Houston-Jones and Peter C. Brosius, more than in the text. Couples toss each other up and down, back and forth, with bone-shattering vehemence. Yet the partners change often, and each man remains essentially alone.

This is a somber panorama, set against the specter of AIDS but referring to it only obliquely. Tom Recchion’s ominous sound track emphasizes the danger and the ultimate bleakness.

Robert Flynt designed a backdrop of projected still images, in tones of black and white and gray, that depict men, often nude, reaching out for each other. In conjunction with the choreography and Tom Dennison’s stark lighting design, which employs the glare of hand-held work lights, the imagery is reminiscent of the contorted men in Robert Longo’s art.

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