Stage Light

With her new work-in-progress at the CalArts Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts, center director Janie Geiser has attempted in “Ether Telegrams” to make the raw physicality and handicraft of puppet theater express the ineffable nature of dreams and the afterlife.

It is this deliberate paradox of using the real to express the unreal, perhaps more than the actual performance itself, that makes this a fascinating experiment and certainly rare in a Los Angeles theater scene so dependent on living actors and naturalism.

The few actors (CalArts students all) in “Ether Telegrams” appear either concealed by masks or in shadow as they manipulate rod and shadow puppets. The evening’s style and theme is supernaturalism.

Geiser has taken her nominal narrative elements from scenes out of Edith Wharton ghost stories, and many of her stage images from another 19th century source--early photography of ghosts. These provide the strength and weakness of the piece, for although “Ether Telegrams” is undeniably, elegantly hypnotic, it tends to lapse into the murkiness of dreams.

Geiser first presents a tableau of figures and puppets, some in a seance, but the key focus is a woman who slams down a phone receiver, which seems to trigger her ongoing connection with the spirit world. Employing projected film, “Ether Telegrams” has the mind-spinning effect of serial and atonal music (uncredited, but recalling a range of composers from Glenn Branca and Bill Frissell to Michael Nyman and Philip Glass) and an ever-dissolving display of vignettes deeply influenced by the nonverbal and design-oriented theater of Robert Wilson. This is epic puppet theater as a head trip, defying rational thought.

It’s a tricky strategy, for just as you’re ready to fall into the dreamy flow of the moving images (Geiser makes short films as well), the sheer number of brief vignettes begins to clutter the central female character’s elegant dream. Even if dreams lack it, a more rigorous focus is needed here so the audience can tap into what is suggested as the woman’s sense of loss and haunted despair.

In the center’s intimate space, “Ether Telegrams” is best viewed in the center rear seats, where the eye can take in the entire stage picture and film images. Geiser’s cast is appropriately mute and inexpressive, either as masked characters or skillfully manipulating the various puppets, which Geiser has described as “mysterious yet tangible, dead yet alive, silent yet articulate.” Most telling of all may be the work’s enchanting highlight--various miniature shadow puppets, like ghosts, moving through a large house--doing away with actors altogether.

Geiser, who is taking “Ether” to the Brooklyn-based Arts at St. Ann’s in June, is mightily supported here by Etta M. Lillienthal’s complex production design full of shifting openings and moving walls, Miranda Hardy’s precision lighting and busy, skilled puppet-builder Anney McKilligan.

“Ether Telegrams,” CalArts, Butler Building #2, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Tonight, 7 and 9; Friday, 8 p.m. Ends Friday. Free admission. (805) 255-7800. Running time: 1 hour.