America, but not quite our own

Maybe it’s not quite a Dutch culture invasion, but it’s close. Tonight the brilliant composer Louis Andriessen, who radicalized Dutch music, participates in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival in Walt Disney Concert Hall. While on Wednesday, downstairs in the REDCAT black box, the young Dutch/Belgian theatrical troupe Wunderbaum and the art rock band Kopna Kopna made their U.S. debuts by demonstrating just where all that revolutionary musical energy has led.

Together these ensembles produce an individual blend of rock theater in “Lost Chord Radio.” Their sensibilities mesh. Wunderbaum, based in Rotterdam and Ghent, is political and raw, its actors also rockers. Kopna Kopna, which originated in the Hague, has a theatrical style, slightly pretentious playwrighterly lyrics and a sophisticated understanding of sound.

“Lost Chord Radio” is about America. This is their America as much, if not more, than our America. The setting is Los Alamos, N.M., but not the Los Alamos of science and business, of Native American culture and breathtaking landscape, or of the atomic bomb.

It is an unrecognizable (to me) Los Alamos as exotic (to them) suburbia, an all-American town of wide avenues and “villas with swimming pools.” Lovable, likable, pitiable, naive, slightly off-key characters -- good Samaritans, white trash, average Joes -- face catastrophe. Quirky, defiant rock music beats deep inside them all. It provides their pressure valves.

Everyone stands on stage at first to describe the chaos theory cliche. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, current is disturbed and brews a storm in a desert thousands of miles away. A disturbance of biblical proportions, this tempest features a plague of locusts, hail as large as oranges, torrential rain and sandstorms with 110 mph winds.

At the center is Lou Palmer (Rik Elstgeest), radio talk show host, weatherman and lost-soul magnet. Among the lost souls who call in are Ed (Matijs Jansen), who drives a white pickup and tries, without much luck, to organize civil defense.

Lynn (Maartje Remmers) is a rebellious schoolgirl. Bizon (Walter Bart) is a half-crazed beat poet Vietnam vet in a wheelchair happy to lead Lynn further astray. Ed helps Jenny (Wine Dierickx), a neurotic single mother. Tough-cookie Tess (Marleen Scholten), a bartender, knocks a glass back for each of the men who have abused her.

All speak good English with strong Dutch accents and none seems remotely American, which may be the root of their charm. This is a Dutch travelogue of an imaginary United States.

Characters reach the boiling point and suddenly explode into energetic rock music. Lynn breaks into a wild dance. In Tess’ torch song, anger and anguish are accompanied by a synthesizer (William Bakker) made to sound like a peculiar instrument designed by Harry Partch.

During one hypnotic climax, all drama stops. The troupe sings, over and over, and louder and louder, “I don’t want to like you.” The band repeatedly drives a percussive, short-long two-chord motive into the singers like a stake into a vampire’s heart. The energy builds to an explosive mass scream.

Then back to mere nature, to Jenny immobilized knee-deep in grasshoppers and Ed beaned by hail.

The concept and realization of “Lost Chord Radio” appear to be a group effort (no writer or director is credited).

Consequently, music and theater have a touch of youthful pretension, but curiously, each art proves a kind of reality check on the other. Music melts the actors’ arrogance. Meanwhile, Wunderbaum’s physical brute force dilutes such Kopna Kopna lyrics as “You’re contesting my breakfast.”

The music, itself, is full of interest.

Guitarist John van Oostrum, for instance, contributed a riveting Hendrix-meets-Xenakis solo and was also responsible for the amusing “locust installation,” some shiny stuff atop loudspeaker drivers that buzzed. This is a band with many reference points.

In content, “Lost Chord Radio” may be slight and slightly obvious, even a bit immature. But the fusion of rock concert and theater is fresh and original. Maturity will come soon enough.

*

“Lost Chord Radio”

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

When: 8:30 p.m. today, Saturday

and Sunday

Price: $28

Contact: (213) 237-2800,

www.redcat.org