In the Beginning ... a Haunting Spectacle

The first book of the Bible has been a kind of wonder machine for Italian artists for centuries. Michelangelo paints the finger of God and it seems no longer just symbol. Lift your head up in the Sistine Chapel and you feel the electricity surge. In the beginning was the word, and in contemporary Italy, composer Luciano Berio and poet Edoardo Sanguineti have been led by Genesis to produce a work, “A-Ronne,” in which the birth of language becomes physical sensation.

There is almost no language in Romeo Castellucci’s “Genesi--from the museum of sleep,” an extraordinary theatrical work given its American premiere by his company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, at the Freud Playhouse on Friday night, as part of the UCLA International Theatre Festival. For this Italian director, little known in America, Genesis is a circusy chamber of horrors.

But despite its many pretensions, this creation epic is full of its own kind of wonder, dark and peculiar as that may be. “I can’t get my head around the concept of Genesis,” Castellucci writes in his provocative program note, “without thinking of creation as a crisis.”

Castellucci has plenty to say--and to show--beginning with the idea that everything in Genesis “is genetic and genital.” He is an intellectual who cannot stop himself from referencing. He is a sideshow huckster who thrives on shock. And he is a genius of theater who transcends all his pretensions to produce a primal spectacle utterly strange yet eerily familiar. “Genesi” contains three long acts, each its own kind of haunting, grim, yet ineffably beautiful nightmare.

First a few words about Castellucci and his company, which he formed in 1981 with his choreographer wife, Claudia, and Chiara Giudi (who is credited here with “vocal score and dramatic rhythm”) in Cesina, Italy. The troupe includes a contortionist and the six Castellucci children.

For the elaborate “Genesi” production, there are credits for machine technique, statics and dynamics, taxidermy, plastic art, scene collaboration, production collaboration. Castellucci’s credits are for “scenes, direction and other sounds.” The main sounds, presumably, are those of the gripping electronic soundtrack by Scott Gibbons

Though a mainstay at the more adventurous European festivals and theater venues, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, a not easily translatable name that implies a society sanctioned by the painter Raphael, has only been seen once in the United States, when it performed its violently bizarre version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in Connecticut three years ago, a production that UCLA will present in early November.

The first act of “Genesi” is the most surreal. It opens in Madame Curie’s lab, where radium glows. Lucifer, an anorexic, takes off his clothes and struggles painfully through the narrow gap between two poles. The anguish, of which there is much in this museum of sleep, has begun. The stage illuminates with images that vanish just as you take them in. Adam is the contortionist. The naked Eve is an old woman with a mastectomy. For a few seconds at the back of the stage, there are two mechanized stuffed sheep seen copulating in a glass case. Odd machines come out of nowhere. At the top of the stage a frame gushes with soapy water.

At intermission, everyone seemed to have noticed a different reference. A colleague comes up plausibly with Max Ernst’s surrealist drawings. A friend suggests Tod Browning, the director of “Freaks.” Joseph Cornell’s boxes are mentioned. I think I’m clever noticing the similarity to the grotesque animators, the Brothers Quay, until I see a program note of thanks to them from Castellucci.

The second act is a softer dream but no less disturbing. The children wander in dreamy, gauzy haze. One small boy dressed in old-fashioned white top hat and tails rides in on a slow, white miniature train. The children shower. There is sweetness and there is horror. They are children in Auschwitz.

In the final act, the idea that creation and destruction are flip sides of the same coin is most dramatically spelled out through Cain, with withered arm, and Abel. Their conflict is slow and balletic. Throughout the act, two dogs scavenge for food. The set is an interesting Expressionist abstraction, stunningly lit.

“I will confess that Schechina (the last Sephiroth) and Max Klinger are the key words,” Castellucci says in his none-too-helpful notes to the first act. But that only underscores the fact that witnessing “Genesi” transcends the need for explanation. You slowly come to terms with its remarkable images in your own way. You find, within yourself, references, meanings, the scary places of your psyche.

At curtain call, in a final bit of ingeniousness, Castellucci wakes you up. The troupe appears as a happy circus family. The children, and the youngest looks no more than 4 or 5, play clapping games. The contortionist takes pretzel bows. Anorexic Lucifer looms. The players, all extraordinary, are Michele Altana Maria Luisa Cantarelli, Matar Fall, Renzo Mion, Aras Hamzayev and Franco Pistoni.

Castellucci’s version of “Julius Caesar,” in which Mark Anthony, having had a laryngotomy, can’t speak his lines, comes to the Freud Playhouse for three performance Nov. 1-3.