Theater Beat : ‘Bonfire’ Seems to Be Everlasting

Dan Ward’s new space opera, “The Everlasting Bonfire” at UCLA’s Little Theatre, features passable music by Mark Carlson and Bill Berry yet remains a long, tedious affair of low-level dance and puppetry. The interminable off-key caterwauling of the so-called singers makes you wish for the silence of outer space.

In this Venice Visionary Performing Arts production, the planet Earth is dying. NASA decides to send up a spaceship (first seen situated on a red toy wagon) with two women (Christine Katzenmaier and Heidi Cole Trenbath) to produce babies and a male doctor (Lonny Zion) to artificially inseminate them with prepared fertilized eggs, in order to give the new human species sufficient genetic differentiation.

Logically, one wonders: Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have all three capable of reproduction? But that would weaken one of the plot’s shredded strands.

The actors become puppeteers (in the bunraku kurogi fashion). Two bunraku puppets--representing the doctor and one of the female astronauts--have free-floating sex. The puppet representing the other female astronaut (now pregnant) is strapped onto a centrifugal-force machine that’s supposed to help benefit the developing fetus--but which looks like an instrument of torture.

There is a subplot about the astronauts saving a group of Chinese who have been abducted and enslaved by aliens. But this only shows that costume designer Salvatore Salmone isn’t quite clear on the difference between China and Japan--or maybe there was some World War II imperialist subtext that I missed.

About nine nonconsecutive seconds of good computer animation can be seen in the two hours plus, and the musicians do a good job.

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* “The Everlasting Bonfire: A Space Opera,” UCLA, Little Theatre (Parking Lot 3), Westwood. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 26. $15. (323) 655-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.