An Avant-Garde Gag

That the Beach Boys’ 1966 album “Pet Sounds” has become a cultural icon is, by itself, an amusing idea. That it can stand with the literature of Gertrude Stein is an even more amusing idea. That Stein’s landmark, if mostly unread, epic novel, “The Making of Americans” might be intoned in Swedish, French Canadian and Japanese accents, to the accompaniment of sounds from “Pet Sounds,” however, approaches the multiculturally outlandish. And the concept of mixing and matching high and low, along with East and West, gets even further out when you add a touch of Japanese folk music and an overarching German sensibility.

But Heiner Goebbels’ quirky “Hashirigaki,” given its West Coast premiere at the Freud Playhouse on Thursday, is a surprising, musically happy and visually ravishing marriage of, if not opposites, at least cultural differences.

This latest entry in UCLA’s ambitious International Theatre Festival manages to elevate Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s low art a notch and, with a wink and nudge, to trivialize Stein’s high art about the same small degree. Along the way, it finds much immediate pleasure in the middle.

The wink and nudge are the key, and are things Goebbels, a composer and theater artist, does often, although he usually yanks things more aggressively out of context. Few of his shows have been seen in America, where he is best known on the fringes of avant-garde classical music and progressive jazz.

As a composer, he always has something up his sleeve; in his intriguing “Suite for Sampler and Orchestra,” from his show (and ECM CD) “Surrogate Cities,” his earnest aural urban soundscape combines cantorial chant, hip-hop and Bach.

Hashirigaki is a term from kabuki that means “running,” “outlining,” “writing fluidly,” and the fluid 80-minute “Hashirigaki” has the quality of an avant-garde running gag. It features Swedish, French Canadian and Japanese actresses of three sizes (tall, average, short) who come and go, determined but without purpose, amid striking decor and garbed in smart, wacky costumes. When they stop moving, they recite liquid, repetitive Stein texts or sing along with rippling, sinuous Beach Boys instrumental tracks. Between the aural and the visual, the show keeps moving.

There are the ghosts of two Wilsons: Brian and Robert Wilson, the latter the American theater artist who comes closest to Stein’s deadpan aesthetic, with its unspoken emotion, its revelatory isolation of the commonplace. Goebbels’ pace is faster than Robert Wilson’s, his stage images a bit less jolting, but still Klaus Grunberg’s set and vivid design, which include a luminous cyclorama, are clearly influenced by Wilsonian brilliance. So are Florence von Gerkan’s merrily high-concept costumes, be they noisy, crinkly jumpsuits or stylized hoop skirts.

What Goebbels lifted from the other Wilson were session tracks from “Pet Sounds,” the version released a few years ago on an excessive CD set that included instrumental backgrounds isolated from the vocals.

Here, the three actresses, bopping to the Beach Boys, replace the distinctively flat sound of Gertrude Stein with cute, and occasionally cutesy, nuances. But for a Steinian, it was a distinct joy to hear an audience laugh in delight along with this wonderfully inventive language.

The women’s accents added loopy interest, and the feats of memory, especially from the tall Swede, Charlotte Engelkes, and the mid-sized French Canadian, Marie Goyette, proved astounding.

And then there is the Japanese connection. The third actress, Yumiko Tanaka, an accomplished koto and shamisen player, is a familiar figure in avant-garde Japanese music who every so often shows up in American settings as well. For the first part of the show, her Japanese folk-music insertions were interesting, no more or less relevant than anything else.

But if “Hashirigaki” has a progress, it is a surfing toward apotheosis in the songs “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No” and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” The last is the cheery conclusion, the three actresses singing and playing along to the instrumental track, with Engelkes managing (not well but still managing) a theremin accompaniment, and Tanaka adding a lovely line on the bowed shamisen, while the sky behind darkens to an enveloping deep blue. It’s a Beach Boys moment unlike any other, inspirational and beautiful.

“Hashirigaki” repeats tonight at 8 and Sunday at 7 p.m., $15-$40, Freud Playhouse, UCLA, (310) 825-2101.