PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Apocalypse Adrift : Rachel Rosenthal’s ‘Zone’ a Flat, Predictable Satire

Seventy-five years after their murder at Ekaterinburg, the last of the Romanovs are still a royal pain.

Portrayed by Rachel Rosenthal and company at the Wadsworth Theater on Friday, the self-destructive Czar and his doomed family wear clown-white makeup, endlessly flaunt their power and speak nonstop platitudes using the maddeningly arch tone of voice that performance artists reserve for the uncomprehending ruling class. As they relentlessly declare for a very long 105 minutes, they’re unredeemably bad, bad, bad, and their pal Rasputin is even worse.

Indeed, Rosenthal’s apocalyptic spectacle “Zone” makes you feel the Romanovs deserved to be killed for boring everyone to death--and her infatuation with them represents a fatal miscalculation. She wants the clan of Nicholas II to symbolize all the evils of a heedless, suicidal patriarchy that continues to bedevil the planet. But her satire quickly grows flatly predictable, and, anyway, the metaphor doesn’t hold.

Like many of our leaders, the last Romanovs ricocheted between law-and-order brutality and gutless, ineffective social reforms, but Rosenthal makes them nothing but pampered, bejeweled oppressors mouthing a specious world view. It’s impossible to identify with these cartoon tyrants, yet that’s exactly the connection she insists upon.

“The dynamics at work at the beginning of this century are sadly echoed in our own times,” she writes in her program notes. “A ruling class oppress (sic) with impunity and doesn’t ‘get it.’ We still don’t quite ‘get it.’ ”

Sounds right, but the failure of “Zone” is that it never makes us feel or believe that “we.” We remain unimplicated. For instance, Rosenthal’s Romanovs are shown as maniacally manipulative and controlling, but when was the last time any of us felt we had the power to make anything but severely limited choices about our lives?

No, the image in “Zone” that resonates the strongest is a comparatively undeveloped one borrowed from an epoch-defining Romantic canvas by Theodore Gericault: people adrift on a raft in dangerous waters. Desperate for rescue, they cling to one another and know that at every moment the smallest action could bring destruction or enhance chances for survival.

That sense of restricted options within a maelstrom not only connects with the evolving Southern California Gotterdammerung but brings us deep within the chaos theory that informs “Zone.” It also allows Rosenthal to work persuasively at an imposing theatrical scale--something the Romanov scenes fail to accomplish.

Part of the problem is her misuse of theater technology: adopting an obnoxiously obvious acting style for the royal family and then making the performers project that into microphones. The result quickly achieves a level of overkill approaching Nicholas’ own excesses on “Bloody Sunday.” Similarly, all the grandiose smoke effects seem a mite ingenuous in a piece with preserving-the-environment as a major theme.

“Zone,” which was also performed Saturday, boasts resourceful choreography by Mehmet Sander, atmospheric music by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev (both uncredited) and Amy Knoles--plus spectacular lighting by Kevin Adams that re-creates some of the more celebrated images from Hal Prince musicals. (There’s the ghosts-in-a-void look from “Follies,” the glare-curtain from “Cabaret,” the masses-on-the-march floods from “Evita,” etc.) Three dozen multicultural volunteers symbolize the proletariat.

Ultimately, however, the evening’s indelible moments are intimate and personal exceptions to the emphasis on overblown rhetoric and pageantry: Angie Bray’s horrifying description of a horse’s death and, better still, Rosenthal’s vivid, troubled memories of Yosemite and Yugoslavia.

Here we marvel again at the inimitable, bittersweet master of mood and insight that created “L.O.W. in Gaia,” instead of enduring the High-in-Concept dowager empress of the avant garde who hectors throughout “Zone.”