Stamped ‘mad in America’

Antonin Artaud’s “For an End to the Judgment of God,” which opened in an unforgettably powerful performance by John Malpede and disturbing staging by Peter Sellars at REDCAT on Thursday night, is easily dismissed as the raging of a madman. Despite having been one of the most influential figures in 20th century theater, Artaud appeared a tortured, raving lunatic when he wrote his last text in 1947, as he lay dying in agony.

He had spent nine years in mental institutions, undergone shock therapy, was a quivering mass of decaying flesh. He had lost his teeth, his hair. His internal organs were in revolt. Though he had striven for a revolutionary “liberation” of theater -- a liberation from the narrow confines of Western logic and psychology into something rawer, richer, more universal -- Artaud now appeared repulsed by the American liberation of France from Nazi occupation.

America, Artaud raved in this text -- written for radio but then banned for its shocking obscenities and shocking sentiments -- was on a mission to overtake the world. It wanted to occupy the globe and wipe out international competition. It intended to turn everything into plastic. No more nature, no more food, just artificial substitutes everywhere.

Created for a festival in Vienna in 2002, just as U.S. troops had gone into Afghanistan, Sellars’ production (from his own translation of the French) is staged as a Pentagon news conference. Gen. Stufflebeem, a spokesman in crisp military uniform, walks up to the lectern (affixed with the seal of the Department of War) and begins tapping the microphones to see if they are working. The popping sounds he then makes are actually the beginning syllables of Artaud’s text. The opening line -- “Everything must be arranged right down to the last hair with the discipline of thunder” -- is plausible. The only other things onstage are an American flag and three video monitors, which show CNN footage from Afghanistan.

Plausibility, imperceptibly, diminishes. At first we are amused. The anti-American disconnect is but slightly surreal, so convincingly cool and spokesmanlike is Malpede as he clinically describes the need to collect sperm from schoolchildren in order to manufacture future military might.

In fact, Artaud’s obsession with America, with its plastic, its power and its commercial design, is delirium with far deeper causes. Artaud moved theater away from the brain and closer to the nerve endings, and with this text he has become nothing but the rawest nerve endings. His pain is unendurable, his demonic voice unbearably shrill. Sellars explained in opening remarks to the audience Thursday that pain is in our lives for a reason. It is not to be denied but taken as guidance, a message.

In this dispassionate Pentagon briefing, a setting where pain is meant to be denied, Malpede comes to excruciating but also ecstatic terms with his suffering.

During hallucinatory passages of the text, Artaud summons up a Native American ceremony of the black sun (Sellars uses striking footage of bombing in Afghanistan as accompaniment).

Then attention turns to scatology, to blood and bones. At last there is the ultimate liberation, from the stinking, putrid, suffocating flesh, as inside out becomes right side up.

Malpede’s performance is a wonder, an hourlong aria without singer that progresses neurotically, operatically, from reason to unreason to insanity to illumination.

There is music -- excerpts from evocations of a Mexican religious rite that Osvaldo Golijov wrote for the Kronos Quartet’s album “Nuevo” -- and it provides a sly, slippery path into the ecstatic unconscious.

When the briefing ends, there’s a question. The actress Ruth Forman stands from the audience and, calmly assured, recites “Kissing God Goodbye,” a poem by June Jordan written in response to a lethal attack on an abortion clinic in Boston. Whose God, Jordan asked, gives permission to kill?

Gen. Stufflebeem remains slouched over his lectern. Absorbed in pain, transformed by pain, he is no longer in a place where he can answer. And at this extraordinary moment, Artaud’s trademark “theater of cruelty” becomes one of spiritual renewal as well.

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‘For an End to the Judgment of God’

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: 8:30 p.m. today

Ends: Today

Price: $40 and $44

Contact: (213) 237-2800

Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes