A few Dewey Decimal points to the subversive

One somehow doubts that when Eagle Rock’s Carnegie Library opened in 1915, its original librarian, Mrs. Blanche A. Gardiner, envisioned the demented masque of “Growing With Ghosts.” Subversive madcap Ken Roht sends his Orphean Circus forces (and audiences) on an outre tour of the eternal cycle, using the beautifully rebuilt structure (now the community’s Center for the Arts) as easel/kiln.

After passing through silk-screened tapestries, the alfresco ticket-holder notes a polka-dotty matron casing the crowd. This male biddy is one of the Blanches, auteur Roht’s 10-member transvestite tribute to the venue’s first doyenne. Inside, four newsboys welcome us before a toy theater facade. The Blanche contingent converges in a Dewey Decimal-decimated opening number (music and arrangements by John Ballinger, with additional composers cited).

From there on, it’s musical theater anarchy meets MOMA in a psychotropic PTA pageant. A Garden of Birth finds pre-Raphaelite pregnant ladies alternating stratospheric harmonies with a sitcom litany of physical indignities. Art gallery walls shift into an Orwellian arena where the adolescent passage unfolds before a totemic robot with Kilroy’s face. More Orpheans, clad in Crayola-boxy pinafores, mature through “Shindig” moves and scatological doggerel. Their conformist nemeses are the Master Minds (the Blanches, inverted) and those fertile females as postnatal tarts.

It all combusts in the basement, with a multimedia installation that suggests Terry Gilliam on peyote. We end where we began, gone celestial, accompanied by live chamber music recalling the Getty’s salad days.

The reviewed performance betrayed technical and thematic discrepancies that hindered unconditional surrender. The introduction and transitions could better prepare viewers for migration; half the event’s lyrics are unintelligible. That could be the postmodern point.

For Roht’s irreverent ingenuity continues untrammeled, his company displays imposing devotion and Keith E. Mitchell oversees hallucinatory designers. Perhaps the logistical site-specifics of “Growing With Ghosts” prohibit the viscera of “He Pounces” or the dazzle of “Splendor: A 99-Cent Only Wonderama.” But Eagle Rock has never seen anything like it, and neither have you. Wear sensible shoes.

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‘Growing With Ghosts’

Where: Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, 2225 Colorado Blvd., L.A.

When: Fridays-Sundays, 7:30 and 9 p.m.

Ends: April 25

Price: $15

Contact: (323) 226-1230

Running time: 55 minutes