October 9, 2002

By Rob Avila

SMALLER COMPANIES OFTEN are best able to register the anxieties of a particular moment, perhaps because they're in a good position to know them firsthand. Two such outfits – both with five seasons of work behind them – have taken on material designed to speak to a nation of rattled nerves.

Combined Art Form Entertainment opens another season of multimedia theater with The Fear Project, a timely triplet of stories. The first, a production of Ray Bradbury's short story The Veldt, is a rich, evocative, and fun tale by a master of the genre. A mother (Susi Damilano) and a father (Gary Dailey) worry over their increasing dependence on an entirely automated house (Jeanette Harrison, who acts out the dwelling's mechanical functions) and especially the devotion of their two children (Joe Ford and Zehra Berkman) to a virtual, interactive nursery populated by their dream of the African veldt and some convincingly lifelike lions. Director Jonathan Luskin directs a reverent, word-for-word rendering in Bradbury's paired-down, transparent prose, all amid an effusive African landscape courtesy of Robert Ted Anderson, James Mulligan, and Ethan Hoerneman.

In Pinch, writer-director Dan Wilson's clever riff on some classic anxiety dreams, Emily Rosenthal plays a woman awaking from one nightmare into another in a wonderfully funny and subtle performance that moves seamlessly between a number of emotional registers. David Westley Skillman, as her food-proffering mate, is less consistent but elicits a suitably mysterious, unpredictable quality in his varied dream incarnations. A darkly comic series of dreamworld visitations include Damilano and Dailey in another, decidedly zanier mom-and-dad duet; Ford as the raunchy, paunchy, and frankly psychotic king of rock and roll; and Claire Canavan in an utterly convincing rendering of an archetypal nightmare: the pregnant unwed teenager. Video director Hoerneman and sound director Steve Kahn create some dazzling effects that nicely augment the twilight-zone feel of the piece.

The final work, 500 Synonyms for Fear, is a collaborative effort directed by Emily Pender and as such, unsurprisingly the least consistent of the three. But along with rough edges come some inspired moments. The plot loosely follows a smug TV news reporter (Canavan) who reevaluates her career after a ratings-conscious producer (Ford) pressures her into compromising her journalistic ethics. Meanwhile, other members of the community gradually rebel against lives circumscribed by media-generated fear. Despite bogging down in some flimsy dialogue, worthier sections, including an infomercial spoof, add life to a thoughtful critique of the interplay between the manipulation of public fears, marketing, and the corporate media.

On track

The nice thing about traveling is not knowing where you are, which, in a sense, means forgetting who you are. But the liberating possibilities that come with being unfettered from memory can be a mixed bag. In Crowded Fire's West Coast premiere of Liz Duffy Adams's comic ride, The Train Play or the Reckless Ruthless Brutal Charge of It, eight passengers more or less deliberately fleeing themselves revel in the opportunities travel brings. The trouble behind them takes different forms – the terrible knowledge gleaned by a lonely scientist (Linda Jones); the series of failed relationships plaguing a weary travel writer (Robert Martinez); the British-style cynicism of a scoffing earth goddess on a bender (Gwyneth Richards); persecuting angels in the case of a delusional Irishman (James S. Craft); the foiled goodwill mission of a fraternal Russian trio; or a 12-year-old's escape from family into an unexpectedly potent comic-book alter ego, Leopard Girl (Elizabeth Bullard) – but the careening journey through the American heartland provides refuge for all, never mind that the final destination may be the end of the world. For Americans, there's possibility there too.

And despite the international crowd, the millennial anxiety here has a distinctly American inflection, a ravenous appetite for independence, luxury, and conquest. Even the Russians end up freighted with American complexes when the poet Dmitri (Richard Bolster) discovers that the arduous journey to the land of his dreams has left him "still not satisfied." We suspect he's just becoming American. Dmitri wants to exchange his pen for a Cadillac and a road trip across the desert.

Solitary disquisitions and some charged encounters amount to just about all the plot there is in The Train Play. The material is uneven. Some internal monologues, while short, can grow tedious. But in the end Adams, a young New York-based playwright, gets us where we need to go. With a comedic and mellifluous verbosity, she plumbs the metaphoric depths of her setting, turning a less than original symbol of our precarious existence into a suggestive concatenation of words, ideas, and personalities. Director Rob Melrose and his cast have a good feel for the comic ends this serves, while some intermittent poetry in the soliloquies flies by too carelessly to be fully appreciated. Meanwhile, Michael Locher's dreamy gold and blue-green train interior and David Sinaiko's complimentary lighting skillfully combine a handful of choice elements into one of the more impressive sets to grace the Exit's main stage.

Crowded Fire's production of this playful derailment of American dreams and apocalyptic nightmares proves that the company, anyway, is on track.