Surreal Estate

By William A. Henry lll

In the beginning was not the word but the ritual. Or so some of the most influential theorists of 20th century theater contend. Thus the avant-garde has sought to reinvigorate drama by going backward, to incantatory sound and allusive visual imagery. In the 1960s and 1970s, such experiments often evoked the grubby and primal. Lately artists like Robert Wilson have mined the elegant surrealism of dreams--and have willingly induced a drowsy semiconsciousness in audiences. Martha Clarke, a former modern dancer with the Pilobolus troupe, has traversed similar terrain in The Garden of Earthly Delights, echoing the Hieronymus Bosch painting that hangs in Madrid's Prado, and now in Vienna: Lusthaus, a fragment ed evocation of a city in moral decay and concealed emotional turmoil during the years leading up to World War I.

Vienna, staged off-Broadway in a church, has a sporadic text by Historian Charles Mee Jr. but nothing like a narrative. Played behind a gauzy scrim, it juxtaposes lyrical nudity and erotic mania, chivalrous honor and military obsession. Some of the images may be dreams, recounted by Freudians in the city where he practiced. Some are chillingly literal and hint of worse horrors yet to come: one woman, speaking in German of a pleasure jaunt, appears to mention Dachau, where the Nazis built a concentration camp. Most striking, however, are the wordless tableaux: the supple blond man who, with boots on his hands, gracefully mimes both partners in an act of love; the soldiers who maintain a drumming kick step even when facedown on the floor; the snow that sifts to earth as Europe spins toward war. In Vienna, the delights are unearthly, the doom implacably real. --W.A.H. lll