I’m not sure what “Stivale” is, but I kind of want it.

The invented word, a la “Verizon,” “Allegra” or “Prius,” serves as the title of Torn Space Theater’s new conceptual production about consumerism, the advertising industry and the seemingly arbitrary creation of desire for products we didn’t even know we wanted.

The 70-minute, uninterrupted and essentially nonnarrative piece begins with an ingenious, albeit unintended, visual trick that is by far the most compelling part of the evening. A singer, Kelly Meg Brennan, stands in front of three intensely bright fluorescent bulbs standing vertically. Clad in a glittery black dress befitting a siren, she belts out a beautiful section from Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras.” When she finishes, the lights flicker off, and she walks slowly and stylistically across the stage (a Torn Space trademark move). The lights surround her, and consequently the negative space of her image has been seared into audience members’ eyes, so that whenever they blink, for at least the next 20 minutes, they see her and think of her song.

This clever device captures exactly the sort of manipulation employed by myriad consumer advertisers, just one method by which they psychologically construct a need for their products. The rest of the play, nicely constructed and engrossing as it is, doesn’t quite match the searing promise of this optical trick.

The play finds two figures, an unnamed boy and girl (Ivan Rodriguez and Dechen Dolkar), confronted with various songs, imagery and poetry. What they hear and see, whether from Shakespeare sonnets or the Ronettes, becomes their vocabulary. And what they want, aside from each other, becomes “Stivale,” an ambiguous product or service advertised on a screen behind them.

Naked, or nearly so, the boy and girl eventually clothe themselves in outfits that descend on hangers from the ceiling. Their repetition of Shakespearean lines — “Till action, lust is perjured” or “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines” — mingles with songs like “To Know Him Is to Love Him” to create a steady commentary and subtle criticism of media messages enticing us toward blind adherence to brand and product. Writer Dan Shanahan, along with his various collaborators on this project, deserve worlds of credit for probing a seldom-explored issue in this stripped-down, deeply affecting way that eschews narrative and strives for the all-encompassing.

Brennan, whose singing ends the evening with two arias from Verdi’s “La Traviata,” is herself a force to behold and a beautiful set of parentheses to a dark night at the theater.

Theater Review

“Stivale”

★★★

Local writer and conceptualizer Dan Shanahan has again created a complex world of corruption, this time effected through the advertising culture.  Innocent creatures are heaved out of Eden and enculturated by STIVALE, a god-substitute of commercial power.  Desire is manufactured for consumer goods and anything that will keep them young.  This prevents the development of the ability to love and achieve mature values and experiences; they are eventually seared by the fires of Chaos.
       What is STIVALE?  Well, a perfume of course.  But behind that is an unknown force, and only the singing voice of the Muse Euterpe can prevent it’s complete absorption of human contenders.
       This account differs significantly from author Shanahan’s, and perhaps from yours.  First you must view the Spectacle and absorb the Lights and Sounds generated around STIVALE.  Beware, doing so may derange your senses and your understanding of what is imparted to you.
       You may not find it that complex.  Miss Delicious just kept saying “erotic, erotic, don’t touch me now” with her hand hovering near her flushed cheek.  There had been a lot of undressing and suggestive movement, and dappling with the Krupnik.
       Ivan Rodriguez unrobed himself as “boy”, looking like a boxer, he scarcely knew what to fight against.  He picked out phrases from the Shakespearean Sonnets.
       Paired on the opposite side of the stage with him, Dechen Dolkar as “girl” moved with great beauty and sexiness, as she got up off the bed and tried to attract his attention.  I think about this time we heard the guitar sample from Jello Biafra’s “Full Metal Jack Off”.  She also interpreted phrases from the Sonnets, but all attempts the two made were in vain.  They both returned to sleeping poses.
       The Opera singer Kelly Marcellina Brennan beautifully carved the wistfulness of “Ah, Fors e Lui”, and prepared herself for losing love and life in “Addio de Passata”, both awesome sung with a cappella skill and clarity.  Her arm upraised from shadow slowly dropped before the flames.
       There were other scenes before the above, and many more sounds used.  Brian Milbrand (Tim Stegner and Frank Napolski) did the Video design and production, Justin Rowland composed, designed and recorded the sound score.  Jon Harper did the Lighting design, Dan Shanahan was the Writer, Director, and contributed to the stage design.  As did Melissa Meola, who did a long list of things including Costume Design.  Many more people are credited, see the program.
       David Oliver performed the readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the sound track.  Not many were used; perhaps more will be in the later, as STIVALE begins a new cycle for Torn Space.
       Did I mention the Ronnettes?  The return of the Fluorescent Tubes? Hurry!

Torn Space Theater producer and playwright Dan Shanahan is on the move again.  Shanahan’s offbeat acting company usually calls The Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle home but some months back mounted an acclaimed play at an unlikely venue, the Central Terminal.  The Mickiewicz, Buffalo’s oldest theater, and the revered Terminal, are priceless local shrines. 

Now, another historic gem is host to the most recent Torn Space original play, the intensely strange “Architect.”  The Dnipro Ukrainian Building, home to Buffalo’s Ukrainian community for more than 80 years, has a wondrous second-story ballroom, walls and a curved ceiling alive with murals and portraits of Ukrainian literary figures, politicos and patron saints, a proscenium stage bordered by fascinating colorful art.  It’s been transformed and actually enhanced by modern latex, piped and tented set by Eric Kanner and Tim Sivertsen. 

The play itself, written and directed by Shanahan in collaboration with Kyle Price, Kanner and Melissa Meola, is nearly wordless and plotless, a visual and aural assault on the senses, an hour or so of energy transferred and a possibly abortive attempt to create a “parallel universe” for a troubled man named Harold. 

We meet Harold, played by Brian Butera, and others in a dreamlike state, an early parade of sleepwalkers gliding to and from areas of light and dark, ritualistic strolls overseen by two “activators” and a woman, Muriel- Harold’s wife? Mother? - A keeper of memories it seems, at an unusual, time-keeping loom, and a girl in a suspended cocoon who doesn’t emerge for reasons open to discussion.  Two “rooms” are visible: a young girl in one, a baby in another.  A pedestal periodically showcases an apparently gestating egg.  Harold conflicted or in flux, tentatively visits these sites. 

As he walks, sounds cascade: gongs, industrial noises, pounding surf, unidentifiable cacophony.  Harold seems to want to change his past, deny it, erase it, at the very least tweak his life circumstances.  If he can’t, say the playwrights, he’ll “go towards his end.”  “Architect” seems to point Harold in that direction. 

Other characters in this cast of 10 join the journey: a man and woman in a forest, doubling as Crumbling Façade and March of Industry.  Singers- a childhood carousel melody, an upbeat old standard, “Linger Awhile” – who are also called Fading Nostalgia.  There is much to sort out here. 

There are as many interpretations for “Architect” as there are hues on the Dnipro walls.  All of them could be right.  Some voice-overs are garbled; this doesn’t help the audience’s need for guidance.  In the end, Dan Shanahan & Company have once again given playgoers much to think about and take home.  With each Torn Space production, sound and imagery play larger roles; the troupe has amazing technicians, with original music here by Kyle Price and Gregg Gregg, costumes and lighting by the mulit-talented Meola. 

“Architect, “ it seems to me, is one of those rare plays that call out for an immediate second look.

3 1/2 out of 4 stars

Up the stairs past the egg sculpture into the dark ballroom of the Ukrainian Cultural Center-Dnipro.  Find your seat for your ride into a different reality, where deterioration and hope struggle in an intense expressionistic universe.  A brief program sets out the parameters of an imagined world, wherein a man attempts to change and reset his universe, using mysterious rituals to bring forth an Egg containing potential. 

Written and directed by Dan Shanahan in collaboration with Kyle Price, Eric Kanner, and Melissa Meola, this conception unfolds slowly and expands both in space and complexity. 

The large set (Eric Kanner and Tim Sivertsen) utilizes in full the grand room, including the colorful decorations of the hall.  Various constructions form discrete structures for each actor.  These constructions are pipe and plank, fabric and twine, one is an egg-shaped cocoon, where a woman continually pulls thread from the womb to sew the seam closed.  Two different birthing bedrooms are shown, one Victorian, on futuristic white and clinical.  The characters in these are played by Brenna Shores, Becky Globus, Kara Mckenny, and Isabel Star Trump.  In a third locus, Muriel (Melissa Meola) sits at a long loom, weaving and talking to us. 

Music grinds like machinery, plucks, veers, sings and samples, adds tension and movement in heartbeat rhythms (Kyle Price), voices and some surfaces are miked.  That long fingernail seems to be very important to the process, it scratches the wall and it seems to peck out the future.  Some of the ambient sound is picked up from the live action, altered and fed back into the soundscape (Gregg Gregg). 

The Lighting by Melissa Meola is harsh for the modern world, warm and dim for the Victorian world.  Later, the balcony opens up with beautiful red lighting and formally dressed singers with Lawrence Welk sincerity (Rachel Griffo and Michael Zachowicz).  They seem to sing to two other characters who are revealed on the stage. March of Industry (James Wild) and Crumbling Façade (stunning Detchen Dolkar), who sit at a table in the backwoods, apparently partied out. 

The architect Harold (Brian Butera) is dressed in a suit, barefooted!  He goes thru various rituals in the present to bring the egg into being, although without the program notes, you wouldn’t know he was the casual character.  He moves in repetitions, looks into distances, rocks, sleeps, and occasionally plucks on a twine line, which cause events to unfold. 

This description doesn’t give the zeitgeist of the piece; the narrative may be the least important part.  How all the various elements of theater come together around these mysteries in different time frames is what develops the sense of struggling to create, to produce the conditions for change, to re-establish hope in a wound down world. 

Director Dan Shanahan assembles sexy and talented young artists and communicates his vision to them, with them, and arcs it to the audience.  This piece is the third in a trilogy, lighter, subtler, more hopeful than the first two.  But it also could have a sequel. 

Dan Shanahan's dark and edgy Torn Space Theater began life five years ago with a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the leading director of New German Cinema and a onetime actor in a group called "Anti-Theater," a troupe given to avant garde adaptations of the classics.

Intense and driven, Fassbinder churned out films full of social criticism, sex and politics, gaining applause and barbs before succumbing to a nightcap of sleeping pills and cocaine. Gone in 1982 at age 36. "Spent," said friends and foes.

Fassbinder often made films of his own stage work, a case in point being "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," a troubled story of looking for love in all the wrong places, a dreamy piece, a "fragile fairy tal," some say. It's strange and full of wince and wonder. A Fassbinder amd Dan Shanahan rematch. Perfect. Briefly, this trancelike peek into the world of Petra von Kant goes like this: Petra is a clothes designer, well connected, divorced, works out of her posh-yet-sterile apartment, where a mute, observant but exploited girl Friday, Marlene, answers to every whim. Into Petra's life comes tall and willowy Karin, street savvy and opportunistic. Petra is smitten and invites Karin to move in. Trouble starts almost immediately. It's all about power and posession - lesbian themes are secondary - and Petra finds that she can't control Karin, why competitiveness doesn't seem to be in the younger girl's vocabulary amd learns too late that she has been used. Marlene watches silently and enables; a so-called friend, Sidonie, secretly snickers at Petra's dilemma; a daughter in need of motherly attention is further alienated; and Petra's own mother arrives amid a violent and gin-soaked tirade only to once again leave helpless and saddened. Marlene packs it in, too. There are indeed Petra's "bitter tears." There's not a soul left to dry them.

There is plenty to praise here. Shanahan's direction is again wise, using music as diverse as The Platters and Richard Wagner to underscore or portend. There is ample threat, cruelty and cattiness but in equal proportions. The languid pace - the right-angled, exaggerated rampway walks to nowhere are repetitive, ultimately annoying and one-too-many vacant stares are Fassbinder staples. Dan Shanahan knows that these things are necessary but doesn't linger on them.

The cast, all women, is laudable. Kelly Meg Brennan gives a bravura performance as Petra, intimidating here, impulsive there, the approach to final implosion gradual and operatic. A stunning role, Brennan beautifully garbed by Melissa Meola - with credit to Brennan's "expansive closet." The extraordinary Brennan is aided by Kara Mckenney as Karin, likeable but maddening; the always precise Katie White; Anna Marie Gillespie as the submissive Marlene; Sharon Strait and Rebecca Globus. Pain and hate, manipulation and a world of hurt on display in "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant." Torn Space Theater is again back with more of the unusual and seldom seen.

3 1/2 stars (out of 4)

The late British writer Sarah Kane, queen of exploitation, a founder of the “in-yer-face” theater movement of the 1990’s, has only a few plays in her body of work.  Her first, the brutal “Blasted,” was called a “a disgusting feast of filth,” “a gratuitous welter of carnage” and “a sordid little travesty of a play.”

And those were the good reviews.

Yet, seven years after Kane’s death at the age of 28, her savage stories are being reassessed, her impact on a cadre of new playwrights give a second look.  Whatever the evaluators find, there is one adjective that will remain constant: night-marish.

Torn Space Theater, Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola’s dark and edgy acting company working out of the old and intimidating Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle are reviving Kane’s third play, “Cleansed,” a tale of mental illness, masturbation, male rape, drugs, mutilation, incestuous sex, gay sex, voyeurism, sadism, and suicide.

Graham, Robin, Carl and Rod are inmates in a mental institution under the control of a psychopath named Tinker.  When Tinker deals a fatal dose of heroine to Graham, the boy’s sister, Grace, arrives to get his clothes, see them, feel them, wear them.  Grace is soon drugged and stays, hallucinating sex with her dead brother, befriending the sweetly deranged Robin, all the while sinking into despair.

“I sometimes want to have a different body,” she says.  If there is a message in “Cleansed,” it is “be careful what you wish for.”

Loud and Pavlovian noises lead the inmates to different venues where shock treatments await or Tinker’s horrific bodily experiments occur.  Tinker wants to see if his charges still love each other after his bloody work.  And this is where there is light and at least a thread of hope in “Cleansed.”  There remains a need to be held and consoled.

So, be prepared for shock and for moments when you just have to close your eyes.  There is some nudity, simulated sex, gore, death and the language is raw.

Dan Shanahan directs this despondent play with a merciless hand and combines with Meola for a ponderous musical score, one that sometimes drowns out the terse dialogue.

The cast is laudable: Chris Standart is evil personified as the despicable, sadistic Tinker; Brian Butera and Matthew Crehan Higgins are gay lovers Carl and Rod; Ryan O’Byrne and Kara McKenny are the siblings, one dead, one alive; Andrew Liegl is scary real as poor, gentle Robin; Becky Globus completes the cast as a maybe real, maybe not topless dancer available to the perverted Tinker.

Three stars out of four.

German playwright Frank Wedekind wrote his first full-length script, Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening, in 1891. He would not see the play produced in Germany for another 15 years, and even then it was heavily censored. Wedekind, who is best known for the Lulu plays, had a talent to shock, but there is much more to the work than that. For over a century, Wedekind has proven to be fertile source material for scholars and avant-garde artists.

Avant-garde theater of every era typically pushes the limits of naturalism and conventional theatrical structure in search of a greater truth. This week, in a preview article for the current Broadway production of Spring Awakening, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times commented that Wedekind used “stylized dialogue, fragmented sentences, episodic storytelling and bizarre scenarios to capture an interior world of feeling and fantasy.”

Interestingly, I saw this production, which reworks Wedekind’s play as a musical, on the same weekend as seeing the Torn Space production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. Seeing the plays back to back provided a fortuitous juxtaposition.

Like Wedekind, Kane found herself at the center of a remarkable theatrical controversy during her lifetime, when the late Jack Tinker of London’s Daily Mail called her first play, Blasted, “This disgusting feast of filth.” So horrified were some critics that there was a call for government funding to be yanked from the Royal Court. Stephen Daldry, the artistic director at that theater, reported getting one press call a minute for the next two weeks.

This was my own first awareness of Sarah Kane, as Daldry was, in those days, the lover of my best friend from college. Stephen was in New York when the review hit and immediately flew home to do damage control, appearing on television to defend the play.

I recall that in my own Buffalonian way, I had difficulty quite believing that this event was actually rocking the theater world as strongly as it was, because it was happening to people close to me. But the Sarah Kane controversy was undeniably international news. The threat to the Royal Court, which had ironically established its reputation as an incubator for savage, groundbreaking work with such plays as Look Back in Anger in 1956 and Edward Bond’s 1965 play, Saved, in which a group of teens stone a baby in a carriage to death, was very real. The institution would survive the Blasted controversy and Sarah Kane would live just long enough to see a critical reappraisal, as each successive work was more enthusiastically received. Michael Billington of the Guardian would actually admit that he had made an “idiot” of himself in not recognizing the emergence of a major new theatrical voice in Kane. Sadly, Kane herself, who was prone to debilitating bouts of depression, committed suicide in 1999.

Torn Space, with its enthusiasm for the savage, the disturbing and the avant-garde, from Quills to Madame Edwarda…, is truly the only established theater company in Buffalo that could take on Cleansed. In this play, Tinker, a sadistic doctor or guard (named in honour of critic Jack Tinker) runs a prison-like institution where he abuses the inmates for his own amusement. Kane explores the themes of love and sadism as she subjects the characters in four interconnected plots to the most hideous atrocities.

In the first plot, Grace, played by Kara Mckenney, comes to the asylum in search of her brother Graham, played by Ryan O’Byrne, who has already been murdered by Tinker with a drug overdose. Tinker is played by Chris Standart with chilling reserve and superiority. Gradually, Grace becomes more and more like the brother she always resembled, first wearing his clothes, interacting with his ghost, and finally, after receiving a penis transplant, by taking his name.

The second plot follows the relationship of two imprisoned male lovers, Carl and Rod. Carl, played by Brian Butera, vows to love Rod eternally and never to betray him, but crumbles when tortured by Tinker. Rod, played by Matthew Crehan Higgins, is unable to make any such promise, but nonetheless sacrifices his life for Carl.

In the third plot, a boy named Robin falls in love with Grace, but kills himself after she teaches him to read and to count, finally knowing enough to understand his predicament. Andrew Liegl plays Robin with palpable vulnerability.

The final plot follows Tinker’s infatuation with an exotic dancer. He lures the woman, played by Becky Globus, into his confidence and then abandons her.

The stories are related in a hallucinogenic style wherein delusion and reality are intertwined. The piece is both sexually explicit and brutal; we witness the humiliation of characters, the removal of a tongue, the hacking off of body parts and so forth. Director Dan Shanahan and his fellow design team members, Melissa Meola and Daniel Toner, accomplish Kane’s hallucinatory nightmare at the the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle & Library with multi-focus staging and the use of such low-tech gadgetry as a bubble machine and a confetti gun. The rough, minimalist setting—a cage, several platforms, a slide and a kind of jungle gym—contribute to the gritty rawness of the proceedings. The actors are all up to the task, with Standart and Mckenney very strong in the leads and the entire supporting cast uniformly good as well. With this play, Torn Space gives Buffalo a taste of the provocative themes and images of British “in-yer-face” theater by one of its leading early practitioners.

Torn Space Theater here presents another angsty evening in the theater.  This play by the English author Sarah Kane doesn’t make much sense, but that really isn’t a priority for Torn Space or Sarah Kane, it is dramatic, it is tortured, it is nasty, it is designed to make you wince.

Somewhere there is an institute headed by a cigar smoking official.  People are brought there, or voluntarily come here, to be fixed, cleansed, electro shocked, broken, killed.  In that process, some find temporary tenderness or strength or meaning, but don’t assume that that includes you.  Even love is claimed before it is stubbed out.

A lot of cuffed sex is implied, love must be betrayed, books burned, history erased, addictions replaced with others, identities combined or switched.  Just another weekend lost at the clubs.  Or spent in a floating anguished mind.

A sense of large space is established in this theater by using it lengthwise and delineating a number of cages and platforms in all directions.  It is a large disjointed jungle gym come back to grind away in your imagination.  The soundscapes are wonderful, except when the electroshock goes on and you can’t dance to that.

After the performance audience members grab their brews.  I talked to some of the cast members about the experience playing the archetypal parts as titled in the program.  The experience for them seemed to gain meaning and connections as they enacted it, and the play looks to be as much for the players as for the audience, the dancer in the dance.  Less politically overt than The living Theater; El Greco churchy but ungodly.  Need a little expiation?  You might wish to ask director Dan Shanahan if there is a small rack you could be chained onto for the night.

Intensely and believably squirming and talking onstage in the pain are actors Ryan O’Byrne, Kara McKenney, Andrew Liegl, Brian Butera, Matthew Crehan Higgins, and Becky Globus.  They are leered at by the master of inflictions, Chris Standart.  Offstage, the design team of Melissa Meola, Daniel Tonner, and Dan Shanahan scrutinizes the action and plans their next assault.

For the outer limit of experimental theater in Buffalo, Dan Shanahan’s Torn Space theater  is the leader of the pack.  His current offering, “Muriel Vanderbilt Goes Walking,” is a work that harks back to the symbolism of Maurice Maeterlinck and the wave of avant-garde drama that followed publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

In his program notes, Shanahan explains that “Muriel Vanderbilt Goes Walking” tells the story of a woman stolen away to her room and forced to listen to the sounds of her husband’s infidelities.”  The explanation is useful, for the progression of Muriel into her mental haunting is not always articulated in specific ways.  Rather, Shanahan confronts the audience with a series of vivid stage pictures, recurrent rhymes and songs, and emotionaly charged confrontations.

The able cast- Melissa Meola as Muriel Vanderbilt; Lenny Ziolkowski as Lenny; Tanya Shaffer as the maid; Bonita Z as peasant woman; Becky Globus as Boy; Karma Smallback as Girl; and Barry Shaffer as Husband- gamely takes us through this hour-and-ten minute poem of a play with arresting focus and energy.  Mr. Ziolkowski is particularly versatile, and gives an almost acrobatic performance.

The work is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s play, Alice in Bed, produced in the New York Theater Workshop’s 2000-2001 season.  In Sontag’s play, Alice James (sister of Henry and William) suffers from neurasthenia and is confined to her bed.  As she suffers, she dreams and hallucinates.  Avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s production made heavy use of video technology, and reduced the number of actors, flattening Sontag's original script and making the character’s dilemma seem very remote.  By contrast, Shanahan’s use of video serves to place the action in unstable environments, and foists the actors more vividly toward the audience.

This is not a narrative theater piece, and is certainly geared towards the adventurous.  After playing a weekend at Soundlab, Muriel Vanderbilt returns to the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle.

A wondrous and profound evening of theater was developed through a great collaboration.  It was written and directed by Dan Shanahan, with Audio Visual designed by Aaron Miller.  And the central character Muriel was exquisitely realized by Melissa Meola.

You entered through a corridor defined by banks of florescent lights at chin level, creating a mysterious sense that you were entering a different universe.  Which you were.  The set and lighting and use of space in the old terminal put you into a supernatural and enlarged world, where Muriel was overseen by huge “custodians,” who guarded the thresholds of the stages that Muriel must go through to end the growing destruction.  This echoed many myth progressions, yet was a unique creation.

The prologue was a Human Sacrifice, interrupted yet continued by the character (played by Tim McPeek) continuing on a tortuous ropeline throughout the rest of the performance.

The audience was banked on one side of the long hall.  The large space was magnificently used by heroic figures at each end of the hall and many varying spaces in the middle, including the tall custodians reaching high into upper windows.  Light and shade were used in many different ways to define or suggest spaces, and slides or videos were used also, bringing the microscopic to huge proportions.  Every once in a while a huge concatenation of sound, light, and movement would disrupt the action with a sense of doom and urgency.

The exploits were there to be experienced rather than analyzed.  The journey was one of wonder and overcoming, not necessarily to a final conclusion, but to a higher plane of discovery.

Memorable moments in the progress included the singing of the Mother, played by Sharon Strait.  Atop a huge pyramidal dress, she sang German lieder and lullabies with great beauty and restrained feeling.  These added to the poignancy of Muriel being so physically distant, having been taken from her mother.  Also, the sublime movement of the Protective Figure (Becky Globus), which guided and helped Muriel through the thresholds including giving birth, the poised drama of the Mother Goddess (Kara McKenny) and the strange hovering danger figure with red lights under it’s torso.

Although there were intimate moments, the general scale of the spectacle, sound, emotions, and transitions was monumental.  The audience was consistently involved by all this, and left wondering at all the designers, crew, and cast of Torn Space Theater had presented.

And what an appropriate use of the spatial grandeur of The Central Terminal.

Terminus, the new Dan Shanahan piece currently being performed at the Central Terminal picks up on his earlier work, Muriel Vanderbilt Goes Walking, as the central character, Muriel, played by Melissa Meola, “confronts four stages of herself.” The event takes full advantage of its spectacular Central Terminal setting with a poetic and ambitious venture into audio- and video-enhanced performance.

Shanahan’s vision for his Torn Space company blazes a wide path across the theatrical landscape, and with Terminus he pushes his efforts beyond the limits of pure theater into performance art. Terminus is not built on narrative or characters in conflict. Instead, like poetry, the piece is constructed of compelling images which evoke great power while they resist definitive understanding. These visual moments are often quite arresting, as when Sharon Strait, as Mother, stands in a large, lighted dress structure at the far end of the terminal, beneath the gigantic arch of window and sings; or when Ryan O’Bryne, as Harold, enters the space from the far end of the room, dragging a large, rolling cart into the space, stops to untie the Human Sacrifice, played by Tim McPeek, and continues on his way. Shanahan often uses Bonita Z to excellent effect (she appeared in Muriel Vanderbilt Goes Walking) and here perches her high atop of a staircase in a sort of expressionistic high chair.

These moments are potent with possible interpretation but defy perfect comprehension. A great part of the pleasure of the performance is audience efforts to penetrate profoundly personal and cryptic material that makes use of images common to all of us. Aaron Miller’s excellent audio, video and set designs deserve particular mention. At a number of points, I momentarily mistook his digital images for living people. His work greatly enriches Terminus, an environmental experience that begins when the audience first enters Central Terminal through a corridor of fluorescent lamps and does not lag until the final unsettling moment. In addition to those mentioned above, the able cast includes Candace Lukasik as Muriel’s Younger Self; GregGreg and Dan Toner as Bonita Z’s fellow Custodians; Becky Globus as Protective Figure; and Kara McKenny as Mother Goddess.

It’s no secret that some of the best theater is produced in basements, back rooms, lofts or other rooms time has forgotten; drafty, hot, clunky, uncomfortable places.  Yet, the venues nevertheless spawn labors of love.

Amenities have never been important to Dan Shanahan and his experimental theater group, Torn Space.  The love for content.  They’ve called the 108-year old Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle home for five years now, and while the East Side hall has seen better days, there is no reason to move.  The company is growing, actors seem to thrive there, and the future looks bright, greater expectations are now the norm.

After exploring Beckett and Pinter, Torn Space has moved on to scholarly, strange, mescaline smoking Aldous Huxley and his meticulously researched psychological study of an incident in 17th century France, “The Devils of Loudun.”  John Whiting has adapted the story for the stage, titled simply “The Devils,” and it is this vision that director Shanahan has brought to dark, diabolical and erotic life at the Mickiewicz.   

In 1634, Urbain Grandier, pastor of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Loudun, France, was burned at the stake.  The handsome Grandier met his grisly end mostly because of his own deeds- he wooed windows and seduced many a virginal Loudun daughter, enraging a cabal of fathers and families- but also because of political naiveté and his gross underestimation of the far-reaching power of the tyrannical Cardinal Richelieu.  Despite the peccadilloes, Grandier felt obligated to protect all of his community from persecution, including Protestants.  Richelieu cared not at all for that, and he and a ruthless fleet of sycophants sought Grandier’s ouster or worse.

Grandier never liked celibacy, didn’t believe in it, never kept his vows.  When he tired of a lover he returned to be “the transubstantiator of bread and wine, the giver of absolution, the assigner of penance,” in the words of one of the spurned, the teenager Phillipe, whose pregnancy began Grandier’ downfall.  Enemies multiplied.  Soon foes outnumbered friends.  Then, the crazed nun, Jean of the Angels, became obsessed with the profligate parson and when Grandier said thanks but not thanks, Jean, already twisted in mind and body, confessed to terribly sinful dreams, visits from devils and demons, prompting church officials from near and far to try their hand at exorcism on her and her postulants.

That’s all Richelieu had to hear.  The trap was laid.  Grandier began the slippery slope from the rack to the wheel to the pyre, his sins of the flesh ostensibly the reason.  Director Shanahan’s staging of Grandier’s final days and moments are genuinely terrifying.

Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun” is staggering in its detail; adapter Whitings’s view of the events tends toward the snapshot account.  Characters are quickly introduced, and it takes some sorting out as sides are taken.  Who are the opportunists?  Doesn’t anyone see through the false accusations?  Was sexual perversion and religious hysteria really rampant in Loudun?

It takes some audience work to figure it out.  There are long minutes of devil possession by Jean and her nuns – writhing, contortions, screams, hisses – to long, in fact.  Early on, during the parade of characters, there is a degree of recitation among a cast member or two.  Nothing major, just distracting.

Dan Shanahan surrounds himself with creative minds: Kara Gabrielle McKenney performs original music on her keyboards, sinister chords, Gothic riffs, supplementing the works of Beethoven, Bach and Scarlatti; Sharon Strait wrote the lyrics for an Act I song; Shanahan himself borrowed a scene from the controversial Ken Russell movie version of Grandier’s story.

Surprise, to, in the gender department.  The fine actress Strait plays the weak-willed monarch, Louis XIII, and Diana Cammarata the powerful Richelieu.

Joseph Demerly is a measured Grandier, intelligently dropping bits and pieces of the living man, effectively transmitting the pain of the dying martyr.  Others of note are Matthew LaChuisa, Christopher Standardt- as the puzzling fool priest, Barre- Joe DiCesare, G. Anton Moore, Michael Votta, Geoffrey Kumm, Elizabeth Oddy- as the deflowered Phillipe- and Joy Scime as Sister Jean, a grotesque villain marvelously played.

“The Devils” is not for the weak of heart, and the lighting design by Michael Lodick is dark for good reason.  Torn Space loves these plays of risk and challenge.

God bless them.

Torn Space theater company, under the direction of Dan Shanahan, is currently offering a smart, powerful, and beautifully performed evening of one-act plays by Harold Pinter.  Hurry to catch these plays at the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle for the opportunity to see a professional production of such intellectually stimulating work is becoming more and more rare.  For Torn Space, however, with its mission to push the limits of theatrical convention, the work of Harold Pinter is actually a move in a more traditional direction.  In his subject matter and in his manipulation of the theatrical forms, however, Torn Space has found a very comfortable kindred spirit in Pinter.

The plays are, Family Voices, One for the Road, and Night.  The first is a series of monologues representing unsent letters between a young man, his mother, and his father.  These roles are played by Joseph Demerly, Sharon Strait, and G. Anton Moore.  Each is perfect, in a well-modulated and moving series of increasingly tendentious and deranged exchanges between estranged family members.  The son, we conclude, has abandoned the family and may be going mad.  The mother is feeling alone and betrayed, and while she does feel great love for her son, she cannot contain a simultaneous feeling of anger toward him.

Local scholar and global Pinter authority Penelope Prentice informs me that One for the Road was inspired by a trip that Pinter took with Arthur Miller to visit Turkish prisons in the 1980’s.  The play examines the torture of three members of the family, a man, a woman, and their seven-year-old child.  Rocco LaPenna plays the torturer, Nicolas; Afrim S. Djonbalic is Victor, the man; Kara McKenney is the woman, Gila; and Ken Lukasik plays their son, Nicky. (Prentice observed for me that the torturer, Nicolas, and the little boy, Nicky, have the same name, reinforcing the idea that anyone can become a torturer as well as Pinter’s own observation that it is the best students who are recruited to perform torture).  The mental mutilations performed by Nicolas as he downs one drink after another, are haunting in their mundane sadism.  The sense of foreboding, even in the face of the violence already done to the characters, is both intriguing and difficult to endure.

Night, the final play of the evening, a lighter, but far from light-hearted discussion between a devoted couple played by Joy Scime and G. Anton Moore provides a needed antidote to One for the Road.  The couple cannot agree on the details of their meeting, but do agree on the tumult of their relationship, their insecurities and wants.

Working with an ideal cast, Shanahan has both rendered Pinter’s words evocatively and has created a number of vivid and disturbing stage images.  Lighting designer Michael Lodick has assisted him in this task, moving the characters between light and shadow, into murky dimness or into harsh light to reinforce the text.

Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola, lovers of the bleak and bizarre, have produced plays at the edgy Torn Space Theater with religious hysteria, the habits of Marquis de Sade and playwright Sarah Kane’s hallucinatory ramblings about death and dismemberment at their centers.

So it seems natural for the company to now attack Absurdist Theater in earnest, specifically Samuel Beckett’s fourth play, “Endgame.”  When you want weird, you might as well turn to the master; and what better place than the ancient Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle?

Beckett, off course, is the patriarch of the absurd, his masterpiece, “Waiting for Godot,” performed somewhere in the world at any give time.  The late Irish-born French citizen wrote plays of hopelessness, man’s inability to communicate and failure to recognize that individual situations can be changed, that circumstances don’t always doom.  His plays can be hard to watch:  Winnie, in “Happy Days,” is buried up to her neck; “Play” has characters immobilized in urns, with only their heads showing; language disappears in some stories; “Not I” features a disembodied mouth and the 30-second “Breath” consists of a baby’s first cry and a dying man’s last gasp.  Alan Schneider, a Beckett director, always believed that Beckett’s words “stick to your bones.”  There is little doubt about that.

“Endgame” is a case in point.  Chess metaphors aside, the play has been thought to have overtones of nuclear disaster, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, plain old terror and that old favorite, the mystery of life.  Choose one.  You could be right.  Beckett wasn’t much help in explaining his plays.  He didn’t know who Godot was and why anyone would wait.  Estragon, from “Godot,” probably said it best for Beckett playgoers: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”

But fascinating.  The scene in “Endgame” is a basement living space.  Hamm, paralytic and blind, sits center- like the chess king, with limited ability to move- and he is waited on by Clov, old and hobbling and forgetful.  Hamm can’t stand; Clov can’t sit.  Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell, live in ashbins and appear when summoned.  Two high windows are visible, one looking out on Earth, the other on Sea.

The four verbally spar, recalling the past, lamenting the present, waiting for the “end;” they could be the last people on earth.  Maybe.  Although there is much talk about leaving by Clov, he doesn’t; one gets the feeling that this scenario, the routine, the banter, the threats, the occasional comic relief, will return tomorrow.  Yet, Hamm, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Prospero, screams, “Our revels are now ended.”

It’s unexplainable, really, but superbly done, directed by guest director Vincent O’Neill from the Irish Classical Theater, who is keenly aware of poetic rhythms and balance.

There is a brilliant cast, a supremely capable quartet: Carl Kowalkowski as the imperious Hamm; the mesmerizing David Oliver as pathetic Clov; the rubbery John Joy as feisty Nagg; Katie White as sweet Nell, whose line, “Nothing is as funny as unhappiness, I grant you that,” pierces the night.

Yes, “Endgame” is “distraught,” as British critic Harold Hobson once said.  But, it’s strangely appealing, and it’s a wonderful theater experience mounted by Torn Space.

Samuel Beckett was notoriously opposed to productions of his plays that took liberties of any kind with his scripts. When JoAnne Akalaitis set a production of Endgame in an abandoned subway station and commissioned a brief overture from Philip Glass, Beckett objected that his play had been “musicalized.’’ He also objected to the casting of two black actors as Hamm and Nagg.

American director Alan Schneider, who staged a number of celebrated productions of Beckett plays, famously tattled on directors who made alterations. Eventually, even Schneider would concede that it is impossible to control the artistic contributions of directors and especially of actors entirely, short of forbidding productions of the plays.

Still, I tend to think that Beckett might have liked the current Torn Space theater production of Endgame at the Adam Mickiewicz Theatre on Fillmore Avenue. Directed by Vincent O’Neill with a first-rate cast, the performance respects every pause and every stage direction.

Endgame depicts four characters confined to a kind of post-nuclear bomb shelter with a window to the land and window to the sea. Clov is a servant to Hamm, who is confined to a wheelchair. Hamm’s father, Nagg, and his mother, Nell, are confined to garbage cans. All of the characters know that they are doomed, and yet they act our rituals of control and retribution, hope and despair. Hamm orders Clov about, forcing him to push his chair around the room, to report on what he sees outside and to fetch him items of comfort.

In this production, Carl Kowalkowski plays Hamm. David Oliver plays Clov. John Joy is Nagg, and Katie White is Nell.

The members of the cast have a lively rapport and bring a great deal of vitality and humor to the performance.

John Joy brings a particularly appealing physicality to his performance; his elastic facial expressions and sighs of exasperation, coupled with his marvelous comic timing, make him very memorable as Nagg.

Katie White gives an affecting performance as Nell. Of the four actors, she is the least appropriately cast—though it might be difficult to find an actress of appropriate frailty and antiquity with enough stamina to climb in and out of a garbage can all evening. Still, Ms. White compensates with her gifts as an actor and gives a very successful performance.

A character actor of impressive range and power, Carl Kowalkowski is well-known for his insouciant sense of comedy. As Hamm, he melds a gnome-like appearance to a troll-like menace as he barks orders at Clov and abuse at his father.

As Clov, David Oliver is precise and winningly beleaguered. It is a strong performance and provides the play its center.

O’Neill’s direction builds momentum and guides the play toward its provocative conclusion, and in spite of itself, reluctantly manages to allow a bit of poignancy.

Very little happens over the course of the play’s one act. The world just winds down.

The set has been designed by Michael Lodick and Cassie M. Cruber with costumes by Melissa Meola. The production is satisfying in every detail.