‘Spirit’ on a Slippery Slope

The British company Improbable Theatre, whose “Spirit” is at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, drew glowing reviews for “70 Hill Lane” and “Lifegame” at La Jolla Playhouse. Key members of the Improbable team also won a lot of fans with “Shockheaded Peter” last year at the Freud.

Lower those expectations. The innovative staging of “Spirit” keeps an audience watching with interest, but the content is sketchy and platitudinous at best, inchoate at worst. The Freud is the last of four stops in the United States before an English tour and then a month at the Royal Court Theatre in London--but from the looks of “Spirit,” it’s still a work in process.

Literally so. The usual Improbable team (Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson, Guy Dartnell) has been joined by co-director and co-writer Arlene Audergon, an American psychologist who specializes in “Process Work,” according to the program. She helps resolve conflicts in such places as Croatia. Her credits list no theatrical experience other than employing her techniques in “training actors and devising theatre.”

Perhaps this explains why parts of “Spirit” resemble a group therapy session. The three actors periodically leave their stage roles and hash out personal grievances--whether real or contrived is hard to tell--with one another. This is supposed to fit in with the theme of conflict resolution that’s explored on a larger scale in the rest of the show. A similar device enhanced Cornerstone Theater’s recent “For Here or to Go?” But in “Spirit,” these scenes serve mainly to reduce the not-yet-fully-developed big picture to the level of the petty.

Which is a shame, for the concept of the show, as expressed in its look, is striking. The set consists of a large wedge, with the audience facing the sharply sloped side--described at one point as “the steepest rake you’ve ever seen,” which is accurate enough. Three men and miniature props pop or crawl out of the wedge through little trapdoors. The actors then bound and climb and roll up and down that slope for nearly 90 physically grueling minutes.

*

A narrative emerges, halfheartedly. These are three brothers, all of them partners in a bakery. The oldest (Dartnell) is drafted for a war, but the youngest (McDermott) goes in his place. He’s killed--or so it seems. Simpson plays the middle brother.

It’s hard to take the purported plot seriously, because of the insertion of so many of the therapy-style scenes, monologues about the deaths of fathers, talk of demons, and the jocular use of rudimentary puppets and model airplanes in order to evoke boys’ fantasies of war.

The puppets engage in wild tussles that resemble Three Stooges material. Yet the overall tone of “Spirit” is cool and subdued, with occasional long silences interspersed with the dialogue and with recorded music that alternates between martial strains and the poignancy of swelling cellos. The story of the three brothers drifts hazily away into the margins.

The program emphasizes that the Improbable guys use improvisation, and occasionally they appear to be improvising within the performance, as opposed to simply using it in rehearsals. But the thrill of brilliantly executed improv is missing.

One of the actors refers to the Freud (or perhaps he uses this line at every stop) as “so wide, it’s just dying for something dramatic and big to happen in it.” Severely contained with the boundaries of the wedge, “Spirit” fails to meet those specifications. It arouses curiosity, but it appears that something much more transformative was intended.

* “Spirit,” Freud Playhouse, northeast corner of the UCLA campus, near Hilgard Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, Westwood. Tonight, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m. $30. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Guy Dartnell: Ted/Guy

Phelim McDermott: Bob/Phelim

Lee Simpson: Tom/Lee

Created by Julian Crouch, McDermott, Simpson, Dartnell and Arlene Audergon. Directed by Crouch and Audergon. Design realization by Graeme Gilmour, Rob Thirtle, Helen Maguire and Crouch. Lighting by Colin Grenfell. Sound by Andrew Paine. Produced by Nick Sweeting. Production manager Helen Maguire.