This icy surface is just a state of mind

Actress Astrid Meyerfeldt glides across the frozen swimming pool on stage. She relaxes on its surface in her plastic lounge chair. At another point, she performs a wacky dance on the icy glistening surface.

These are indeed strange goings-on, but consider the source: the legendary Berlin-based theater company Volksbuhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The troupe, directed by Frank Castorf, is bringing Dostoevsky’s somber tale “The Insulted and Injured” to life, with an occasional injection of slapstick.

On Wednesday, the play (in German with English supertitles) begins an exclusive three-day U.S. engagement at the Freud Playhouse as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival.

“The Insulted and Injured” has several remarkable aspects to its set. There’s the rotating floor, the glass-fronted house, the video cameras that capture the action indoors, even rain. But while much of that depends on technology, the frozen pool -- in effect a 12-by-30-foot ice rink -- is built on illusion.

Using real ice blocks was too expensive, says Volksbuhne technical director Stefan Pelz. So he used 20 panels of PVC plastic to line the bottom of a flat water basin 4 centimeters deep.

“They have special joints for easy setup and strike-down, and they’re covered with 1 or 2 millimeters of water,” he said. “We put dishwashing soap into the water. For the audience it looks like ice because it’s translucent.”

Pelz adds that the dishwashing liquid also makes the watery surface more slippery. “The actors skate on those tiles with ice skates. It looks quite convincing.”

The 4 1/2-hour play, which tells the tale of a maligned fiancee whose father demands retribution from an unscrupulous prince, won awards in Europe for director Castorf and set designer Bert Neumann. Their previous project, an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” also had a set that featured a swimming pool. Neumann says the frozen pool in “Insulted” was an interesting reversal. “The actors can skate, they can slip, they can be physically active.”

One of the actors, Bernhard Schutz, spreads potting soil over the ice area at the play’s close, which means there’s a major cleaning every night. “The skates scratch the surface, and the brown earth gets into the panels,” Pelz said. “We use a high-pressure jet system like a carwash cleaner. They get really white, so you can use them for every performance.”

Martin Wuttke takes his thespian turn on the ice sans skates. He likens his work on the set to life: “It’s slippery, sometimes wet, and you get rained on. You struggle from one mishap to another. You’ll slip and fall, you’ll hurt yourself. But you’ll try to get up and move on.”