Intelligence Comes Out of ‘The Box’

At first, sitting in a single row surrounding the arena stage at the ZJU Theatre Group, you have to wonder about “The Box”: It’s written and directed by a guy who calls himself Zombie Joe. (He greets you at the door--his group’s initials actually stand for Zombie Joe’s Underground--and he seems to be a sweet enough fellow.) Then, the action begins with the entry of a pair of actors wearing wire electrodes on their heads and chests, chanting inchoately, followed by two men holding guns and looking ready to fire, followed by four caped and hooded figures. It all seems like the kind of thing Woody Allen would use as a spoof of performance art.

A funny thing happens in “The Box,” though. As wordless scene follows wordless scene, there’s a real intelligence that emerges, combined with the sort of playful daring that American experimental theater artists have always had a knack for. Although Joe’s group seems to have the kind of disciplined sense of physical performance that was a mainstay of Poland’s Jerzy Grotowski, it’s closest to the loose, unpredictable group explosions associated with New York’s Wooster Group.

The thread through the one-hour, 12-scene evening is a small black box in the middle of the stage that definitely has powers of its own. At times, it inspires struggling artists to create. At other times, it serves as a podium for dictators such as Castro, and in the show’s most inspired bit of lunacy, for a minister and rabbi tussling with each other and trying to hog the dais. It even comes alive at one point, issuing mysterious electronic and radio frequency noises.

With sound editor Sam Batzdorff and costumer Jeri Batzdorff providing some strong sensory effects and texture, Joe has fashioned a world that resists explanation, in which forces beyond our control appear to affect characters in terrible and wonderful ways. But those characters also interact, again wordlessly, and the physical dialogue is more often revelatory than trite.

The people operate here on a highly ritualistic basis that’s the mainspring of “The Box’s” comedy. Five women sit and stand on the box, repeatedly fingering their hair and cooing, but it’s as if they’re stuck in a running loop of self-adoration. A blind woman repeatedly walks around the stage periphery until she looks cornered, only to be rescued when two marching men in superhero costumes arrive on the scene. A woman falls in love with a statue and gives it offerings until, feeling rejected, she’s ready to shoot it with a pistol. A thief meticulously lays out, with the detail of a Japanese tea ceremony, a dish of pie to share with a competing thief, and it seems to quell their urges to violence.

It’s easy in the year 2001 to begin to think of the box as equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s monolith, with Joe’s sometimes ape-like humans deriving knowledge and power from it. None of this would be nearly as memorable or funny without a team-oriented ensemble, and the group of Rachel Bourne, T. Arthur Cottam, Denise Devin, Jenny Gabrielle, Eiji Inoue, Brennan Marquez, Lori Murphy and Walter Williams are up for the game.

BE THERE

“The Box,” ZJU Theatre Group, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 13. $10 donation. (818) 202-4120. Running time: 1 hour.