BAAL

Fovea Floods, a theatre company based in upstate New York, has brought an electrifying production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal to the Ontological Theatre here in Manhattan. This extraordinary company of actors, led by co-artistic directors Josh Chambers and Timothy Fannon, has created a striking, sensate feast out of Brecht's first play, one that manages to shake us out of our complacency even as it finds startling contemporary equivalents to both the adolescent angst and the souped-up sensationalism that characterize the piece. Barraging the audience with a dizzying hyperactive carnival of multimedia theatrics, they've created one of the most exciting events of the summer. Unfortunately, they're only here until the end of this week, so you'll have to take quick action if you want to see this remarkable work.

Baal tells the story, in 22 short scenes, of the short rise and long, debauched fall of a man whose disdain for everyday morality defines and then destroys him. When we meet Mr. Baal, he's an anonymous clerk who also writes poetry. When one of his poems gets published, he drinks in his fleeting notoriety greedily, launching himself eagerly on a decadent path of self-indulgence. We watch him court celebrity as a flavor-of-the-month rock star; we watch him deflate and then implode as he sinks deeper in depravity and excess.

It's not a terribly original story. Brecht intended it, I think, as a reaction to the first world war: how could morality endure in a world capable of such mass self-destruction? Almost a century later, humankind is less naive about its capabilities, and so Baal can almost seem quaint. Credit Chambers and Fannon and their colleagues with finding several apt contemporary parallels that make this Baal as compelling as it is.

This Baal manages to assault us with such raw power that the production achieves something akin to the shock value that Brecht was also most assuredly going for; it also alienates us, profoundly--the way that his later creation, epic theatre, is supposed to. We're literally provoked into attentiveness by a relentless and uninterrupted flood of images and sounds, forced to parse the noise from the sense and to do it quickly, before the next onslaught of sensory data. The stark, minimalist set folds in and out on itself, accordion-like, to become a boarding house or a country inn or a forest; the lighting shifts moodily and mercurially from bright to dark and back again; the actors morph and mutate from character to character, here juggling and dancing, there defining arcs of space and time with near-mechanical precision--and doing so, mind you, all over the place: behind, above, and within the audience as well as on stage. All this synchronized to a booming, eclectic soundtrack; and all given a semblance of structure by a detached, disembodied voice delivering narration so coolly ironic that it only bothers to finish 21 scenes.

The chaos of the presentation informs and then overwhelms the text, which is. of course, precisely the point. I think Brecht would have loved, for example, the intrusion, right in the middle of one of Baal's more harrowing scenes, of Freebo the Clown, reminding us to contribute to cultural institutions and to wear condoms. Our experience echoes Mr. Baal's as the play seems to spin more and more out of control and into a bleak, nightmarish dreamscape. What Fovea Floods does here is to really make us feel this: palpably; even painfully.

The dozen performers who play the nearly four dozen roles in Baal are extraordinary: disciplined, inordinately skillful artists of astounding versatility and ability. Timothy Fannon, who plays Baal, is electrifying, showing us the transformation of this man from a callous club kid to a Caligula-like satyr to a ravaged and polluted walking corpse. Bob Hendren, Ethan Cole, and Jason Berenstein, who take numerous roles as a sort of three-man chorus, are also worthy of special mention.

Theatre this visceral, immediate, and adventurous doesn't come our way very often. Get to Baal if you can; and watch for the next theatrical offering from this remarkable troupe known as Fovea Floods. I know I'll be waiting for it eagerly.