STAGE REVIEW : A ‘Dream’ at Sushi Explores Funny and Dark Sides of Love : Performance: David Cale spellbinds audience with his sensual vignettes.

Performance artist David Cale sat in a metal chair under spotlights Thursday night and spellbound his audience at Sushi Performance Gallery for 80 minutes.

A talented writer as well as actor, Cale’s “Deep in a Dream of You” is a finely structured and well-paced theatrical work.

Cale opened the show with the same line that he used to close it: “I want to take you swimming in the dark.” It was a perfect metaphor for the dreamlike imagery of his 12 spoken vignettes.

“Deep in a Dream of You” runs for 3 weeks at the downtown space, and had its premiere in Chicago last February. There, Cale was accompanied by an ensemble of musicians. At Sushi, however, he performed solo, and the simplicity works because the English-born New York based-Cale is enough in himself.

Here, the only music heard was a taped segment of the Frank Sinatra song, “Deep in a Dream of You,” and Cale’s use of the crooning song is savagely funny, for it comes at the end of a scorned lover’s attempt at revenge--a masochistic sexual encounter--which backfires pitifully.

Although amusing in places, “Deep in a Dream” is essentially about the unfunny aspects of love. Cale sets the exchanges between his characters in the sleazy orange of a 40 Winks Motel room, by a New Hampshire lake “where the fish are warm,” on a Mediterranean beach, in New York City, “somewhere in North Carolina,” and, among other locations, in an English town, where fleeing Gypsies leave behind a curse of dead white rats hanging by their tails on the hedgerows, but where blue butterflies by the hundreds blow through the fields, and skylarks racket through the sky.

The dreamlike context of Cale’s vignettes does not hide the graphic sexual subject matter. Instead, the sensual experience is heightened. Like actual dreams, some of his material is excruciatingly realistic, and some is inscrutably surreal. Emotional impact is keener “in the limited light of the moon.”

His is not the drug-induced hallucinatory language of the Symbolist poet Rimbaud, either. Although one senses meticulous, scintillating detail in his writing, it isn’t actually there. The actual words are relatively mundane--an artful illusion. He achieves this effect through tightly acted characterizations and a savvy absence of junky slang in his vocabulary, which leaves his images clear and simple. This simplicity, in turn, leaves enough “space” in his story cycle for the listener to hear a familiar ring.

Even though Cale uses “he” and “she” in his concisely structured narratives, and although he changes the pitch of his voice, the sex of his characters is frequently in question. The success of this ambiguity is one of the work’s finer points.

Passions and desires presented in the stories may not be universal, but they are unisexual. They are also heterosexual and homosexual. A person’s sex becomes irrelevant. Through his characters, Cale describes infatuation, shame-filled lust, self-degradation, abject neediness, jealousy, numbness, sexual addiction and fairy tale idealization.

He shows charismatic seduction from the perspective of the seducer in one story, and in another, enacts the succumbing swoon of the seduced. And he reveals, in a variety of guises, the helplessness of loss.

He exposes the emotional hollowness of the narcissist, the uselessness of being in love with an image, the criticism of a lover that is mere projection of one’s own self-loathing, and the obsessive craving to be transported, to be carried out of one’s self by another through love or sex.

And, no matter how low his characters sink, how they grovel, victimize or become lost in their own neuroses, Cale never loses empathy for them. His work is wholly humane.

“Deep in a Dream of You” continues today, at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.; and Sunday at 8 p.m. Performances are Thursdays through Sundays through June 30 at 8 p.m. with Saturday performances at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. At Sushi Performance Gallery, 852 8th Ave. Call 235-8466 for ticket information.