Gathering to Share an Experience

Good theater stimulates a cycle of tension and attention. If onstage events are sufficiently compelling to maintain a level of vicarious tension within the audience, the audience responds by focusing its attention on those events. The fact that theater is happening in the present moment, unlike canned entertainments, should intensify both the tension and the attention.

In many cases, the focus created by the artificially maintained “cabin pressure” inside a theater is eventually shifted to the “real world”--we relate what we’re seeing to our lives outside the theater. But in Anne Bogart’s “Cabin Pressure,” a SITI Company production at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, all that focus is channeled back into the theater itself. “Cabin Pressure” is a staged essay on the nature of the theatrical experience.

Teachers of theatrical theory who want to enliven the curriculum may consider this production a godsend. Anyone who has never pondered the meaning of theater may well find it illuminating. Its visual images are crisp, and a recorded musical score adds an illusion of depth.

For a general audience, however, “Cabin Pressure” is a little too insular and abstract. It doesn’t achieve the level of ongoing tension and attention described above, for it’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with Bogart and company. The evening would be livelier if a devil’s advocate articulately challenged the piece’s self-reflective ruminations.

In publicity materials for the production, it’s described as “interactive” and as “an American ‘Noises Off,’ ” but neither is justified. The Freud audience is never asked for physical or verbal input, and hardly any distinctive fictional characters appear, other than those in excerpts from more famous plays.

Four actors are already busy as most of the audience enters, repeatedly doing a brisk rendition of the final scene from “Private Lives.” After the house lights finally come down, they soon assume the roles of anonymous audience members who are being surveyed on their reactions to the play, guided by the fifth member of the company, portraying the moderator of an after-play discussion. These lines are taken from audience surveys that Bogart conducted after productions of “Private Lives” and another play. The comments are remarkably inarticulate. Anyone can draw a blank when asked “What did you think?” but these comments must have been edited to make the audience seem as obtuse as possible.

Scenes from other plays, more “audience reaction” and quotes from theorists such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Artaud and Brook make up the rest of the text. We briefly return to “Private Lives” from a backstage perspective.

The production’s final sequence is its highlight. The cast plays a lineup of audience members watching a play. But their narrow shifting in their seats gradually broadens into a kinetic dance sequence that suggests a cathartic release of all that stored-up “cabin pressure.” At last, the transforming power of great theater is visible--but it’s a little too late to make “Cabin Pressure” great theater itself.

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* “Cabin Pressure,” Freud Playhouse, northeast corner of UCLA, near Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue, Westwood. Tonight-Sunday, 8 p.m. $25. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.