STAGE REVIEW : ‘Eurydice’: A Waltz on the Wild Side

Some theatrical pieces are like road maps. They show you exactly where you’re going as you go. Others project you like a missile on a course you can tell little about. In such cases, it is usually best to let yourself go along for the ride and check out the map later. With any luck, it’ll give you some idea of where you’ve been.

So it is with Reza Abdoh’s “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice” which opened Wednesday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. A prerequisite is that you float along with the piece, not searching too deeply for meaning and especially not for logic. If you’re game, if you’re open to seeming and actual incoherence and chaos, if you can take nudity and strong, often raw, but almost always striking language and imagery, the completed journey will be staggering if not always as illuminating as Abdoh might like. Many of his symbols, analogies, references and cross-references remain private, caught in the undertow of his own River Styx--his brooding creative juices.

The pleasures (for some they will remain problems) are overwhelmingly visual. The characters are androgynous or aberrant. The acting and performing is superior. In the case of Alan Mandell as the puppetmaster of this menacing underworld, a sleazy blimp with a face full of warts, it is exceptional. The video projections by Adam Soch are--as they should be--disturbing and remarkable.

Sets, costumes, makeup, sound, score and choreography unite under Abdoh’s unblinking eye to reflect his abstruse but insistently single-minded vision. There is a there there, and it is reached not through the mind but through the senses. Anyone who appreciated Abdoh’s “Minamata” at this theater last year will find “Hip-Hop” to be at once new and familiar territory.

And just as seductive and impenetrable. The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice is buried very deep within the folds of this performance piece. The program offers subdivisions that acknowledge the legend. (Orpheus’ Nightmare, Murder of Eurydice, Passage Through the Elysian Sea, the Underworld). But were it not for that, the title and the recurring tug of love and war between Tommy/Orpheus (Julia Mengers) and Dora Lee/Eurydice (Tom Fitzpatrick)--the genders are intentionally reversed--it would remain unrecognizable. The Captain could be any boss, authority figure, prison warden or tyrant.

Yet the events that unravel on Timian Alsaker’s sullied set--a dreary, water-stained, high-ceilinged cell with a bed and what is by turns a window and a video screen--communicate effortless menace.

Props roll in and out or drop from the grid. They range from oversized phalluses to food and a motorcycle, from instruments of torture to musical instruments (including the staff and gourd, attributes of pilgrim saints).

By far the most compelling visions occur on video, however, from Orpheus/Tommy’s frantic motorcycle race on a highway of death, to exploding Statues of Liberty, the decapitation of animals, the torture of people and political superimpositions that send potent anti-censorship messages--including maggots that eat away at a portrait of Jesse Helms and a naked dancing male body attached to the head of President Bush.

Not for the faint of heart.

A program note suggests that “Hip-Hop” is the offshoot of an actual nightmare: “Abdoh visualized an Orwellian society in the 21st Century where sex is punished by death. He heard a monstrous vice cop scream at a married couple named Orpheus and Eurydice, ‘We’re gonna bore desire right out of you.’ ” This is now a line in the piece.

Among his influences are Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus,” the movie “Blood Feast,” Japanese Kabuki, Brazilian capoeira (a martial dance), Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Virgil, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and Karl and Groucho Marx. Eclectic hardly describes it. Unlisted but certainly also present is Hieronymous Bosch.

There is a waltz. There is paradox. God, by any definition, is prominently invoked and sometimes repudiated. A kind of holy irreverence permeates the language. A dragon, symbol of Satan, is slain. A line recurs: “The place we rip open again and again that always heals, that’s God” (Rilke).

The final pastoral scene, intensely reminiscent of the one in “Minamata,” exudes a disturbing kind of peace that slowly degenerates into an internal landscape of desolation, abandonment and fear.

Puzzling, fragmented, hard-edged and brilliant as a diamond, “Hip-Hop” cannot be dismissed any more than “Minamata” could. It is enormously skillfull. Yet for all its amorphous genius, it exacts more admiration than passion. Perhaps that is a reflection of the world we live in. Or will live in. To quote another influence, the futurist J.G. Ballard, “In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.” Whatever “Hip-Hop” is, it does not easily let you go.

“The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 3. $22-$27; (213) 627-5599. Running time: 95 mins.