Up close and perspicacious

“Turn on the lights, turn on the lights.” So goes the first of countless motifs woven through the stream of cosmic consciousness that Andre Gregory offers in “After Dinner” at REDCAT. This shamanic ritual in workshop guise by Wallace Shawn’s legendary dinner partner keeps the houselights on from beginning to end, even though Gregory’s internal fire could combat a statewide power outage.

For longer than much of his audience has been alive, Gregory has probed the rehearsal halls, protest rallies and deepest reaches of the human condition with the curiosity of a child, the fervor of a satyr and the insight of a visionary. These qualities are intact here, if hidden under Gregory’s self-possession, his embodiment of mentor Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical principles and his alertness to all in his purview.

It’s therefore apt that Gregory, vital as ever at 70, ambles on while the audience is still assembling. With the invaluable Julie Hagerty and Larry Pine in tow, Gregory approaches the three tables that center the marvelous, stripped-back venue: “We’re not beginning quite yet,” he tells the capacity crowd at Wednesday night’s opening. “So just keep on chatting.”

This is only the first of Gregory’s sleight-of-hand tactics. Scripts are shuffled and eyeglasses are located; Gregory removes his sweater, offers us chocolate (“Audience participation.... Pass it around”). Then he launches a hypnotic, hilarious, piercing merger of master class and personal symposium, so intent on immediacy that we repeatedly find ourselves forgetting to breathe.

The core of the evening, which Gregory describes as “my ‘After Dinner With Andre,’ ” is “Bone Songs,” a series of love poems that he began in the ‘80s, inspired by 33 years of marriage to first wife Mercedes, better known as Chiquita, who died of cancer in 1991. The sonata-style material, which evokes Rumi, Thornton Wilder and James Joyce without ever seeming referential, is elegiac, furious and rhapsodic by turns -- true theatrical poetry.

Gregory and his colleagues trace a scenario that suggests Pirandello on a slow boat to Antarctica with Beckett rowing and Brecht at the helm. Pine is a redoubtable talent. He and Hagerty, whose growth from airborne ingenue to Ibsen-worthy artist is remarkable, interact with each other and the magus seated between them with invisible craft.

Gregory frames his work in progress with autobiographical commentary and matchless perspicacity. His gift of gab, which too many know only from the cult classic film “My Dinner With Andre,” traces familiar territory as if relating it for the first time. His early escapes from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany with parents he likens to the Macbeths; an outre Hollywood childhood surrounded by the icons of the ‘30s and ‘40s; the collaborations with Shawn (“Wally”) are all here, leading to a second-chance second marriage and the joy of being alive, right now, tonight.

Even if “Bone Songs” were less vivid, Gregory’s existential magic would designate “After Dinner” a must-see, and the Q-and-A that follows it is a rare privilege.

Like the Saturday afternoon screening of the late Louis Malle’s “Vanya on 42nd Street,” also at REDCAT, this too-brief engagement, which will end Saturday, is, simply, not to be missed.

*

‘Andre Gregory: After Dinner’

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, Los Angeles

When: 8:30 p.m. tonight and Saturday

Ends: Saturday

Price: $24 to $36

Contact: (213) 237-2800; www.redcat.org

Running time: Approximately 1 hour, 30 minutes