Scary stuff

Two new shows dig up Monsters from the Underworld.

By Robert Avila

SISTERS RHODA ( Randy Danson) and Gwen (Lorri Holt) sort through the remaining loose items in their dead father's house, making small talk as they do, or arguing over who gets an Ansel Adams print. It's clear from the siblings' body language and strained conversation that the big and nearly empty house (which still sports an imposing grandfather clock) is brimming with things not said. That's the case in many families, but when Gwen's 20-year-old son Finn (Clifton Guterman) draws a red baseball cap from one of the storage boxes and puts it on, the sisters' ghost-white horror tells you there's a little more to it than that.

Twenty-seven-year-old up-and-coming playwright Jordan Harrison's Finn in the Underworld – now enjoying a slick world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre under associate artistic director Les Waters – ingeniously mingles dark family secrets with the barely repressed buttoned-down violence of the modern age, all under the roof of one cold war-era haunted house. Built by Finn's grandfather with a fortune made by marketing fallout shelters to suburban families of the 1950s and '60s, the house (as well as the family's wealth and class image) already rests on fear.

Bright, highly literate, unruly, and outspoken, Finn arrives on the heels of a scandalous affair with a college professor. But her son's sexuality remains just one more unspoken subject in the room for Gwen, an emotionally fragile woman with a ready supply of blue pills – "for clarity," she explains to Rhoda, and to tamp down an unwelcome tendency toward clairvoyance. Nonetheless Finn's desires, which lead him and middle-aged neighbor Carver (Reed Birney) downstairs into the basement bomb shelter (a room studiously avoided by his spooked mother and aunt), inexorably call up everything that's being denied, as Carver's revelations about Finn's grandfather mingle with their own subterranean forays into forbidden sex.

In a production adeptly joining cinematic as well as dramatic influences (Harrison cites Henry James's "Turn of the Screw" and Robert Wise's The Haunting among the inspirations for the play), the scenic design becomes a crucial aspect of the story's progressively delirious ride. As the story unfolds (in a nonlinear fashion, cutting sharply back and forth over a single day), personalities and histories multiply and overlap, hanging together in a volatile equilibrium contained in and symbolized by the house itself, which (courtesy of David Korins's startlingly fluid set and Matt Frey's feverish lighting) actually moves as if it were something alive or constantly shifting in perspective. The banishing of closeted fears and desires to the basement might even evoke an image of the psyche itself as a piece of prime suburban WASP real estate on the corner of Eros and Thanatos. Either way, there's no solid foundation to it, only history – a repressed and continually recycled system of patriarchal control and violence that, in the sadomasochistic role-playing going on in the basement, gets known as "the education."

Excellent performances and generally sharp dialogue are impeded only by some vagueness in the play's otherwise appealingly hallucinatory final crescendo, making the ending note especially less than effective. The repetition of certain stage effects, meanwhile – such as the numerous stings in Darron West's otherwise impeccable, subtly unsettling sound design – can grow a bit tedious. But the production gathers wonderful talent, both on- and offstage, behind what is, in the end, an imaginatively vital and resonant ghost story.

Happy haunting

The Exit Theater Café is also haunted at the moment, by the frankly strange intensity of Dan Carbone, and a trunkful of inanimate objects possessed by his fervid imagination.

Performer-playwright Carbone has been offering admittance to his modest little universe since 1995, and there's no denying the carefully crafted nature of these quietly outlandish vignettes (directed with loving attention by Joseph Graham), or the fiercely offbeat talent behind their secret stories, private little songs that must be sung, pussyfooting choreography, slide projections, and (with Malcolm Sherwood and Eliza Perkins) choice sound cues. Most of the promised menagerie in There Be Monsters! either gets drawn from the mysterious trunk at the foot of the stage (Wolf Baby, for instance), or walks through the door, like special guests Cow Man (John Bauman) – a surprisingly expressive figure in a plastic novelty head and flesh-colored unitard – and the doughy-faced life-size doll named Lori Ann (Jennifer Gwirtz) who, as the song has it, "has got a demon in her head."

Carbone's unchained subconscious delivers up these fondled toys and decorative items with an undiminished relish, like a do-it-yourself pagan's mystical communion with the hall closet, or a stylized version of some OCD-driven creativity spied in the studio apartment across the street. If There Be Monsters! can also create its own special monotony, there come fairly regularly and full-bore some gloriously off-key moments that match words and images in a heightened, koanlike banality – reminiscent, to me anyway, of something off a Nib Geebles wall calendar (but Google for yourself).

'Finn in the Underworld' runs through Nov. 6. Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m.); Wed. and Sun., 7 p.m. (also Sun., 2 p.m.), Berkeley Rep's Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk. $30-$59. (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org.

'There Be Monsters!' runs through Nov. 19. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Exit Cafe, 156 Eddy, SF. $10-$20. (415) 673-3847, www.sffringe.org.