DANCE REVIEW : Shooting Spree Is Grist for Troika Ranch

The Troika Ranch theater company offered its first work over the weekend at the La Boca studio downtown--”Frame 313,” a well-crafted, multidisciplinary work based, astonishingly enough, on the deadliest shooting spree in the nation’s history.

Company founders Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello built the piece around the massacre that occurred last year when George Jo Hennard--an unemployed former Merchant Marine seaman--crashed his pickup truck into a cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., shot to death 22 people, wounded another 23 and, himself wounded by police, committed suicide.

Coniglio wrote the dense, poetic text (and less dense music), which evoked some sympathy for the deranged killer, masterly portrayed by Nick Erickson who shifted from near catatonic withdrawal to inspired babble, and also took part as half of a bright-eyed talk-show team. Non-linearity was the guiding principle here.

Stoppiello gave herself merely a modest, shadow role as the killer’s Comrade, but devised a stylized, slow-motion movement vocabulary for the victims--dancers Mary Hunter Ellegood, Scot Hendricks, Diana Mehoudar and Ken Talley--that appeared to multiply their numbers and certainly to multiply their agony.

Ernie Lafky strongly enacted the detached Narrator cum reporter cum coroner cum psychologist cum protagonist’s dark shadow.

Of all the creators’ ideas, most audacious was presenting the killer finally as the dead Jesus in a version of Michelangelo’s Pieta: Perhaps his vision of himself, perhaps their statement about ultimate innocence and forgiveness.

The two have allowed themselves poetic liberties. Far from being a frustrated, inarticulate poet, Hennard was--according to news report in The Times--”a belligerent man with an explosive temper who was drummed out of the Merchant Marine because of drug use.”