‘Mercy’: Rites of Nonsense at the Met

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction?,” Mark Twain once wondered. “Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”

Of course, Twain never saw “Mercy,” the solo performance piece by Martha Gehman at the Met Theatre, which seems to offer elements of both truth and fiction but makes very little sense of either.

A free-style, evidently semi-autobiographical rant, “Mercy” features Gehman,the daughter of actress Estelle Parsons, acting out the story of what looks to be an ill-fated romance. In fact, the piece is so fractured and opaque it’s almost impossible to determine what, if anything, the relentlessly tongue-in-cheek Gehman is trying to say.

But what she lacks in substance she makes up for in presence. Clad in pink tights and a leopard-print miniskirt, the earthy and indefatigable performer dances en pointe, tells anecdotes in rhymed couplets and smears brown greasepaint on her face and arms (a wry homage to Karen Finley?).

That she completes all these rites in 45 minutes may go a long way toward explaining the title.

* “Mercy,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 16. (213) 957-1152. Running time: 45 minutes.