Language Unravels in ‘Terminal Hip’

Sporting a narrow tie, shades and retro hat, and furiously scratching disjointed symbols on an array of chalkboards, solo performer Mitchell Gossett’s nameless hipster doesn’t so much lecture about the unraveling of language as preside over it in Bottom’s Dream’s revival of “Terminal Hip” at Ivy Substation.

“Paranoid paraffin inching up ne’er-do-well moon-stalks in garden did and easy does it,” runs a typical line in Mac Wellman’s densely associative verse monologue. A perfect specimen of form mirroring theme, its frequently incomprehensible but nonetheless impassioned outbursts could pass for schizophrenic ravings.

A different kind of sense emerges, however, if you concede the all-but-futile battle of trying to parse the monologue for linear semantic content, and instead let Wellman’s recurring imagery and the carefully crafted mood shifts in James Martin’s staging guide the experience. Like Wellman’s oft-mentioned panda bear, meaning itself is an endangered species as the language cycles and devolves through recurring riffs on a famous Abbott and Costello routine: “Who’s the moon bops hops on first / What’s on second, a barnacle goose of chronic looksee / I don’t know’s on third, the flying wing of the written word.”

Without literal content to structure it, Gossett’s pinpoint delivery is all the more impressive in its desperate grasping at increasingly elusive significance, culminating in a sardonically hilarious sync with the exasperated Lou Costello’s “I don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Amid the twilight of substance that passes for modern communication, Wellman’s inescapable conclusion is that no one else does, either.

* “Terminal Hip,” Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 19. $15. (310) 231-0446. Running time: 55 minutes.