Where the Wilder things are

Photo: Cotton Talbot-Minkin

Matthew Woods and his Imaginary Beasts are without question the most daring theatrical programmers in the city - and maybe the world.  Indeed, Woods seems innately averse to the known theatrical quantity; he has an almost relentless taste for the obscure - I can't think of anything I've seen by the Beasts (aside from their winter pantos) that has been anything less than a rarity.  A typical Beasts season will lean heavily on Gertrude Stein, or Witkacy, or Meyerhold - and not even on their best-known stuff.

It sounds like a formula for commercial suicide; and certainly the Beasts aren't yet packing in houses. But like many on the intellectual edge of the fringe, they have slowly built a following, largely because despite the incredible range of his projects, Woods finds in all of them a mirror of his own eccentric perspective.

Indeed, next to Woods, just about every director in Boston looks hopelessly derivative.  He may be the Hub's only theatrical original, and certainly the only local director whose work depends utterly on a literal vision: in a Woods show, the movement, staging, costumes and lighting coalesce with a rare unity. But how to describe the ethos at their core?  For an Imaginary Beasts production is indeed a curious thing; the tone is whimsical, but its underpinning is strict; the atmosphere is usually one of surreal, magically sublimated innocence, like that of a forgotten daydream from childhood - but a sense of formal inquiry always moves beneath the sophisticated "simplicity" of the action.  Lewis Carroll and Gertrude Stein; puppetry and nursery rhymes and pantomime; these are the lodestars of Woods and the Imaginary Beasts.

A portrait of the artist as a young man.

So it's no surprise that Woods' style would find a haunting resonance with the "playlets" of Thornton Wilder, who was the gay offspring of a raging Calvinist father, a teetotaler who described his second son as "the last word in high browism; a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad . . . hopeless." Looking at Wilder's prim college-age self (at left), you don't doubt the accuracy of that assessment.  But they said the same thing about Proust, didn't they; and somehow both dreamy queens contributed something unforgettable to our literature.

You can feel that contribution gestating in "Little Giants," Woods' bestiary of some of Wilder's juvenilia (as well as a piece or two from the end of his life, which I guess count as senilia). The production wraps this weekend at the Boston Center for the Arts, and its enchantments are well worth a last-minute look, particularly for those curious about the mind behind the classic Our Town.

Judging from the evidence here, that mind was drawn (as Woods and the Beasts are) to the art of sublimation - as well as the sublimations of art. Those who have noted the strict denial of sex and other dark temptations in Our Town will be unsurprised to find the sensual impulse is relentlessly transmuted here into chastely florid musings on the likes of "Childe Roland" and Pietro di Cosimo (whose twisty imagery Woods has tapped for his publicity). Death and Mozart, mermaids and "leviathans," dark towers and young heroes fill scene after scene; you can tell much of this fantasy was dreamt up at Oberlin and Yale, but that doesn't compromise the poignant yearning informing it.  A prissy young man who writes of a lonely mermaid longing for a seaman is not too difficult to psychoanalyze, it's true; but that doesn't make these fables any less beguiling. A Wilder scholar might also be intrigued by the glimmers of later gambits that surface in the texts (I felt I glimpsed motifs from The Matchmaker and The Skin of Our Teeth), but what lingered the longest with this particular reviewer was Wilder's preternatural sense of his own importance, his struggle with the premonition that he was destined for something eternal.  At 20, I'm sure that looked more like self-importance than importance - but almost a hundred years on (Our Town is enjoying its 75th anniversary this year), I think we have a different perspective on his self-image.

Photo: Roger Metcalfe

To be honest, however, many of these dramas (like much juvenilia) aren't particularly dramatic. Still, the Beasts' poetic playing style makes the most of them.  Only the Beasts could conjure, for instance, a raging ocean - with a mermaid breaking from its waves - in the confines of the BCA's Black Box. And there are many such transfixing moments here - Death overcoming Mozart; the tentacles of the Leviathan; the starry night that guided the flight into Egypt (at top); these images, rather than the texts of Wilder's immature skits, are what you remember from "Little Giants."

This production seemed to mark a surge of fresh acting blood into the Beasts - but generally, those with more experience in Woods' eccentric modes did best. The exception was Gabriel Graetz, whose fussy clowning was a standout (indeed, his improv with Beth Pearson may have been the best "playlet" of the evening). Meanwhile familiar Beasts Molly Kimmerling, Amy Meyer and William Schuller (as the mermaid, at right) brought their customary skill to bear on the material, and newcomers Tim Hoover, Cam Cronin and Amanda Goble all had their moments.  As usual, the remarkable costuming was by the gifted Cotton Talbot-Minkin; Jill Rogati provided the evocative puppet design.  I could not pretend that "Little Giants" is for everyone; but I have a hunch it will build the Beasts' audience by at least a few more increments.

The Beasts have a kiki

Jill Rogati, Christopher Nourse and Kiki Samko listen up.

If you haven't heard, the Beasts are back - the Imaginary Beasts, that is, and "back" with their annual winter panto, this time (loosely) based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (through this weekend only at the BCA).

What's a "panto," you may ask?  (Sigh. You're so out of it. I suppose next you'll ask me what a kiki is!)  A panto is a charming British mode of children's theatre, in which a favorite tale or nursery rhyme is sweetly scrambled by a laundry list of tongue-in-cheek performance traditions. These include cross-dressing heroes and heroines, silly dance numbers, call-and-response routines, booing and hissing (of course!), a panto-load of slapstick, as well as a very mild dose of innuendo for the grown-ups.

In short - what's not to like?  And Head Beast Matthew Woods is obviously devoted to the panto (he climbs up onstage as the villain every year - this time he's all but unrecognizable in beaver-sized buck teeth); what's more, in crafty costumer Cotton Talbot-Minkin he has found a kindred spirit who conjures perfectly the Arthur Rackham/Maxfield Parrish "look" that grounds the form.  

And after several years of putting on these daft extravaganzas, the Beasts have pulled together a band of veterans who know just what they're doing.  The whole troupe is amusing, but special shout-outs this year have to go to Jill Rogati's shapely Ichabod Crane, Joey Pelletier's irrepressible "Dame Vivian Van Winkle" (whose rendition of "Tiptoe through the Tulips" is a highlight), Kiki Samko's super-spoiled Katrina van Tassel, and the reliable Michael Underhill's "rollicking, roaring, roistering" Brom Bones.

To be honest, this show is probably best enjoyed with kids (who "get" the panto form in some deep way); it also helps if you're tickled by shouting things like "Look out behind you!!" at the stage.  In this year's edition, I was most struck by the occasional shadow-play, and wanted more of it (I dream of the day the Beasts break out into a larger budget, as their whimsical design skills seem to know no limit).  I was less taken by this year's pop number, the Scissor Sisters' "Let's Have a Kiki," which I know sounds like a great choice, but didn't seem to conjure anything too kicky.  On the upside, the action was in general a little tighter than I remembered from last winter, so the adults didn't get restless (for some reason the kids never do).  Not that I'm complaining.  Something about the wacky whimsy of the panto form has seduced me too; seeing any of them for me is like having a kiki.

The Maeterlinck mystery

The Imaginary Beasts get lost in Maeterlinck's web.

Perhaps no reputation has fallen faster - or further - than that of Maurice Maeterlinck.  A century ago he was thought to all but personify highbrow theatre.  He was awarded a Nobel Prize; had a clutch of high-minded hits (Pelléas and Mélisande, The Blue Bird); and over the course of his career inspired a treasure trove of early modern music.

And then he was completely forgotten.

In fact I can't think of a production I've seen of Maeterlinck in years - his name probably only survives piggy-back, as it were, on Debussy's, whose landmark score for Pelléas and Mélisande has entered the standard repertory (although you could argue the opera itself has not).

So I was intrigued to see that Matthew Woods and his Imaginary Beasts had programmed a revival of The Death of Tintagiles (at the BCA through November 17).  My first thought on hearing this, frankly, was that if anyone in town could revive Maeterlinck, it would be Woods - he's Boston's only home-grown theatrical visionary.  A Woods show is always a strange kind of tableau vivant mixing the surreal, the sophisticated, and the whimsically superficial into a kind of staged soufflé that feels simultaneously innocent and worldly. And perhaps due to his consciousness of his own singularity, Woods is always  drawn to the esoteric and the eccentric; I mean who else would have programmed their past few seasons with Gertrude Stein, Lorca, Witkacy, Ionesco, and Maeterlinck?

Still, Woods doesn't quite manage to breathe theatrical life into Tintagiles.  Like much of Maeterlinck, it's intentionally static, only half-revealing a bizarrely fraught situation: young Prince Tintagiles is threatened by the Queen (his grandmother), who waits for him, hidden in her castle like some enormous spider; his sisters attempt to protect him, but all is in vain; in the end, he's murdered (offstage) by Grandma as his siblings scream for help.

That's pretty much it.  Maeterlinck does spin from this slim premise a heady atmosphere of fatalism, as well as an associated mood of masculine impotence; he's a bit like Kafka with an Oedipus complex.  Unlike Kafka, however, he doesn't fully develop his themes - short as it is, Tintagiles gets repetitious, and it relentlessly resists any apparent dramatic pay-offs.

Woods does illuminate brilliantly a patch of aesthetic ground he shares with the playwright, however.  Maeterlinck was so opposed to what we think of as the life's breath of theatre - risk, spontaneity, emotion - that he sometimes said he preferred marionettes to actors.  (In that way he's a bit like Robert Wilson and other avant-gardists; perhaps his impulse has survived, even if he hasn't.)  And Woods himself has occasionally been called a puppeteer - his highly-determined form of stage "play," which sometimes amounts to choreography, certainly isn't for every actor.

So it was intriguing to see this director had followed Maeterlinck's instincts and cast a marionette as Tintagiles - and what's more, the supporting cast often dons masks and behaves as if they were (life-size) puppets, too. What all this amounted to was a curious kind of symbolist bunraku in which puppets were manipulating puppets - and everyone was not only negotiating their own strings, but a literal onstage web apparently spun by Maeterlinck's Shelob-like monarch.  Woods even brought his action to an added level of disassociation by often separating the voices of characters from their bodies; the theatrical experience itself was thus a kind of sensory web.

Still, despite these resonances, the piece felt slightly inert; whatever psychopathology drove Maeterlinck's doomy sense of foreboding here, I'm not sure Woods actually shares it.  Certainly the cast - Kendall Aiguier, Mauro Canepa, Molly Kimmerling, Amy Meyer, Christopher Nourse, Amy S. West, and particularly Kiki Samko - did their best to put over a building sense of terror, and the piece does prove an exquisite formalist object; like all Imaginary Beasts shows, it's gorgeous, with exquisite pre-Raphaelite costumes from Cotton Talbot-Minkin, and evocative lighting and design from Christopher Bocciaro and Brian Choinski (the evocative puppets are by Elizabeth Breda and Bill Hawkins). But despite its high finish, the production never quite grabs you. We get the puppets, yes - but we have no idea what, or who, is pulling the strings.  I admit that this gap is actually Maeterlinck's intent.  The trouble is that's probably why he has been forgotten.

A rhyme for all reasons

The Imaginary Beasts bring the British panto to American shores.

Local impresario Matthew Woods has been producing his "pantos" (that's short for "pantomime," although "pantos" are far from silent) up on the North Shore for years, but Boston is only now getting a taste of his whimsical take on this cherished British tradition in The Half-Baked and Hard-to-Swallow History of Humpty Dumpty, or One Egg is Enough, which Woods's Imaginary Beasts are presenting at the BCA through February 4.

What is a panto, you may ask?  And should you see one?  Well, the answer to the second question is definitely "Yes - particularly if you own, or are renting, children from ages 4 to 7, or even older if they still believe in Santa."  The answer to the first query is a little more complicated.  A "panto" is an exuberantly foolish piece of nonsense in which much of what you'd find in American vaudeville or even burlesque is benignly applied to glosses on fairy tales and Mother Goose.  Think commedia crossed with Lewis Carroll and you've got roughly the idea.

But a panto obeys its own unique set of dramatic rules - which you get the impression Mr. Woods is quite devoted to (although he's happy enough to update his routines with the likes of Lady Gaga).  The dialogue is mostly rhymed couplets à la Ms. Goose, for instance, and gender is always reversed for specific roles: the male heroes are played by women, the dowagers by men.  There are also standard call-and-response sequences which must appear, and which give pantos much of their structure and shape.  These include the hallowed 'Oh no, it isn't/Oh yes it IS" smack-down, lots of booing and hissing for the villains, the occasional sympathetic "A-wwww!" for the hero, and especially the delicious "Look out behind you!!!" whenever big spiders, wizards, dragons, etc., approach on tip-toe from the wings.

Now I have no idea why this odd formula works as well as it does; but you should know that the kids at last Saturday's matinee were transfixed by this silly soufflé for something like two-and-a-half-hours.  And I mean riveted. Hypnotized.  Quiet as mice, saucer-eyed, waiting patiently for their cues, understanding in some deep way that here at last was a piece of theatre pitched at precisely their level, with no extraneous civics lessons besides the old ones about loyalty, honesty and pluck.

The adults were maybe a little less absorbed, to be honest. A panto is supposed to be a shaggy-dog story, but this one struck me as shaggy indeed; a good twenty minutes could be trimmed.  But frankly, that's not what any of the six-year-olds in attendance would have said; I fully believe the kids in that crowd could have watched the show for another hour.  And I can't pretend I didn't have a pretty good time. Indeed, I was simply happy to be introduced to a new platoon of lively, game young actors who approached all this square silliness with the utmost seriousness; the entire cast was strong, but I was particularly struck by newcomers Mauro Canepa, Denise Drago, Sam Eckmann, Derek Fraser, Molly Kimmerling, Christopher Nourse, Jesse Wood and Jill Rogati, who made a daringly weird, but eventually endearing, Humpty Dumpty.  Woods himself stole scene after scene, preening in a deliriously fey get-up as Old Icicle, who was determined to bring down a permanent winter upon us all. But then everyone got a great get-up in this show: Woods' secret weapon is costumer Cotton Talbot-Minkin, who once again produced a fleet of delightfully fanciful ensembles that seemed to channel both Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham.  The whole thing was endearing and sweet, and you can't go wrong with bringing the kids, trust me.  My guess is that Woods's pantos may quickly become a new Hub tradition; why not be there at the start of it?

Macbeth remixed

Nate Gundy as "Banco" in Macbett.  Photo: Nancy lasBarrone.

We may not have seen an actual production of Macbeth in, well, years, but two of the play's derivatives have been on the boards this season - first the Verdi version, from Boston Lyric Opera, and now Ionesco's absurdist Macbett, from Imaginary Beasts at the BCA (through this weekend).

Although to be honest, Ionesco doesn't so much derive from his Shakespearean source as attack it; at the bottom of the Bard's arguably-darkest tragedy, Ionesco still perceives an essentially naive, romantic illusion regarding personal moral dimension - which he ruthlessly dismantles.  In Macbett, the hero's royal victim, Duncan, is himself a slime bag, and half-mad to boot (and the incoming heir to the throne seems just just as bad).  Indeed, everyone in the play is corrupt, or will soon be corrupted.  Power is the only morality, while ideas like "destiny" are just a cheap trap for the gullible (Ionesco's "witches" are merely tricksters- indeed, maybe they're only Missus Macbett in disguise!).  Thus "tragedy," at least as Shakespeare defined it, does not, and cannot, exist.

Now I'm not going to argue any of these ideas in the abstract - for in the end, Ionesco is only re-iterating a point that the ravages of the twentieth century seem to have already  made for him.  But I will argue, however, that the playwright doesn't seem able to sustain this point through two acts of a satire which feels quite a bit longer than its source.  Indeed, Macbeth towers over Macbett, which rambles, and gets a bit repetitive and convoluted, and yet doesn't achieve anything like the depth that Beckett conjured through the (seemingly similar) repetitions of Waiting for Godot.  Instead, despite a few inspired episodes, you can slowly feel the theatrical equivalent of the Law of Diminishing Returns kicking in for Ionesco, even as he gropes for a dramaturgical exit. So maybe there's something to be said for naive, romantic illusion -  at least in this example of the Theatre of the Absurd, the joke in the end seems to be on the audience.

Which isn't to say that the current, clever production from Imaginary Beasts doesn't have its compensations.  There are two particularly strong performances here, from fringe stalwarts Joey Pelletier (as Duncan) and Scott Sweatt (as Macbett), that are probably the best things either actor has done in some time (even if both get a little shouty - in the BCA Black Box we're only five feet away, guys).  Pelletier brings a sharp, sallow wit to Duncan's sleazy shenanigans, while Sweatt becomes a compellingly perverse Macbett once he has tasted power; indeed, his gleeful kissing of the corrupting crown is one of the most disturbing things I've seen onstage in some time.

The rest of the cast is strong, but not quite as distinctive - although intriguing turns come from Nate Gundy (above) and Kiki Samko.  In an Imaginary Beasts show, however, actor intention and achievement are always a complicated thing to parse, because the troupe's signature style of movement and imagery, devised by director Matthew Woods, often takes center stage.  Here, this is sometimes a blessing, but also occasionally a curse - for while it's true Ionesco is sometimes imagistic, in Macbett, well, not so much; here the dramatic mode is more often blunt, even brutal, simplicity.  And so Woods' signature style of evocative (yet inevitably artificial) movement can feel a little forced.

Still, the director does score several visual coups - the first appearance of the cast in body bags, and the transformation of the Macbetts into a life-size Punch and Judy, were both particularly apt, and the physical production, which seems balanced between a British pantomime and a Kurosawa movie, is filled with striking touches (like Macbett's samurai-by-way-of-Princess-Padme make-up) that stick with you well after the final curtain.  Students of Ionesco - or simply students of intelligent, exploratory theatre - will find much to admire in this stimulating production of a flawed, but intriguing, play.

On the twentieth century

Modernity runs out of control in The Crazy Locomotive. Photo by Meg Taintor.

Long-time readers of the Hub Review know that one of my ongoing concerns is the difference between the academic and the truly intellectual - a critical concern you'd think would be of paramount importance in a college town like this one. Or so an idealist might think. Realists, on the other hand, would be unsurprised to learn that our major universities are often more concerned with revenue generation than aesthetic advance.

Harvard has been the leader in this area - the A.R.T. is by now literally anti-intellectual, feeding the middlebrow masses a steady diet of pop "revolution" that might have been programmed by the B-school (all of it bearing the Harvard insignia, of course, much like a sweatshirt or a tote bag).  So the top of the academic heap is actually at the bottom of the intellectual heap, theatrically speaking.  This situation is perverse, but has its own Machiavellian logic; after all, in the new free-market consensus, universities must be popular to be good; ergo, the theatre at the greatest university in the world must sell the most tickets.  The fact that this formulation essentially contradicts the raison d'être of nonprofit theatre doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone around Harvard Yard.

Elsewhere the news is better, I admit, but still a somewhat mixed bag.  After a dismaying detour into the junky precincts of Pirates! and its ilk, the Huntington has regained its lost integrity, and is now our go-to house for high-quality, grandly-scaled production; but it's still prone to sugar-coating the content of its shows with sentiment or political correctness.  Thank God for ArtsEmerson, the local theatrical upstart which is currently the stand-out among our college programs - it's not producing shows yet (it's entirely a tour-driven operation), but it's probably our only university theatre that is actually devoted to the life of the mind.

But what do you do when ArtsEmerson is dark - or when the Huntington succumbs to the blandishments of another Pirates!?  Well, you could check out the opera or the ballet!  Or you could turn to our mid-level theatres - but you'd soon discover they're erratic, and that even the most consistent (like SpeakEasy Stage) are politely, but persistently, hostile to intellectual challenge.  Indeed, you'd generally have to drive all the way out of town, to one of Charles Towers's productions at Merrimack Rep, to find a small Equity production with brains.

Or you could turn to Boston's fringe, where a handful of companies faithfully keep the intellectual home fires burning.   Among these few - these happy few! - you'd have to count Mill 6 Collaborative, Whistler in the Dark, Imaginary Beasts and the seemingly dormant Rough and Tumble and Beau Jest.

Of these, Imaginary Beasts, led by Matthew Woods, is probably the most fearlessly eccentric.  Indeed, Woods stands out from the pack as that rare thing - a genuine original pursuing a unique vision; I really can't think of another director in the city making the kind of personal statement I'd ascribe to Woods.  He's half-director and half-designer, although he fuses those two roles into a theatrical style that's simultaneously charming and challenging, and always visually arresting.

On the surface, Woods seems devoted to an almost child-like sense of poetic nonsense (he's already well-known on the North Shore for a series of much-loved British "pantos," which I wish someone would bring to Boston).  Only in his more serious works, it's clear Woods views "nonsense" in the same way Lewis Carroll and Gertrude Stein did: as a way to poke around at the very basics of conceptualization.

That sense of intellectual investigation is probably what drew him to The Crazy Locomotive (which runs through next weekend at the BCA) by the painter-playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (who, in the best Imaginary Beasts fashion, referred to himself by the "nonsensical" name of "Witkacy").  Here the "nonsense" isn't that of a children's book - it's more like that of an eight-year-old's drug-induced fever dream, for Witkacy (at left, in a quintuple self-portrait) combines in his script a crazed expressionism with an unnervingly innocent egoism; imagine Lewis Carroll on speed as well as LSD, or a child Wittgenstein clapping his hands at the destruction of the world, and you've got Witkacy.

Like many of his works, The Crazy Locomotive is an ironic meditation on the forces of modernity running out of control.  The engineer and fireman of his eponymous train (which is really the play's central character) turn out to be two madmen, Travaillac (Mac Young) and Prince Karl Trefaldi (Joey Pelletier), who become bent on simply racing its engine faster and faster; they all but scream in sexual ecstasy as it barrels down the tracks toward its own destruction.  The train's passengers, of course, are screaming for a different reason, but there's no stopping the crazy locomotive, which eventually crashes in a singularly spectacular fashion, even as the play crashes through all semblance of conventional drama into a free-fall of dream-imagery and narrative shards.

That's the whole plot, such as it is - yet it's quite pregnant with symbolic and analytic meaning.  The locomotive itself is clearly a frightening metaphor for the mind-set of the earlier twentieth century - in which revolutionary technology seemed to be offering mankind thrilling new horizons of accomplishment, but was instead ushering in an era of horrific destruction.   Tellingly, Witkacy's engineers don't reach higher and higher levels of awareness as their locomotive goes faster - instead, they regress into deeper and deeper fantasies of power and isolation (eventually they're playing at Robinson Crusoe).  Compare and contrast with today's relentless promotion of digital technology and the Web!

Or don't, but simply enjoy the wild-eyed irony of The Crazy Locomotive; after all, we're all stuck on this technological train, we may as well enjoy the ride until the crack-up. That mood of ironic distance was re-inforced by the fact that Woods set the play in a kind of cinematic, rather than theatrical, space; Mac Young's scenic design recalled not a locomotive but a zoetrope, for instance, and it was operated by none other than Charlie Chaplin himself (Marlee Delia, in a surprisingly convincing disguise).  These whimsical ideas may have undercut the power of some of Witkacy's imagery (the locomotive is supposed to spew actual flame, for instance), but they wittily extended his metaphor.  Alas, there was a similar trade-off at work in the acting; Woods's brilliant costumer, Cotton Talbot-Minkin, clothed the play's victims (and made them up) in silent-movie conventions, and they performed in much the same manner.  This unified everything at the design level, but the sense of air-quotes around the performances kept a lid on the bubbling chaos Witkacy seemed to want to conjure.  And leads Mac Young and Joey Pelletier, two of the most accomplished actors on the fringe, brought plenty of gonzo energy to their performances, but never seemed to connect in that way that evil geniuses always do.

Nevertheless, Woods (and Young, and lighting designers Michael Underhill and Jenna Stelmok) scored a tremendous coup in their staging of Witkacy's bizarre finale, which takes place after the locomotive's apocalyptic crash.  Here a semi-transparent curtain descended over a single corpse (or perhaps merely unconscious body?), upon which fleeting, shadowy images played like memories, or echoes, or ghosts.  Where we in the subconscious - or the afterlife?  Or perhaps some sort of ontological limbo?  We were never sure, but the effect was grippingly poetic, and certainly one of the must-see theatrical moments of the season.

Impossible dreams

This weekend marks the last performances of Dream of Life: The Impossible Theatre of Frederico García Lorca from Imaginary Beasts, which is probably the most daringly literate theatrical outfit in town. Lead Beast Matthew Woods's last effort was a staging of late Gertrude Stein; earlier, he mounted a personal fantasia on Lewis Carroll. Dream of Life marks a return to obscure Lorca (above left) for the troupe, as Woods produced an adaptation of the playwright's farces in 2007. Which only points up the gently obsessional quality evinced by this local impresario - he's a theatrical outlier (based in Lynn) who has been pursuing an eccentric, personal vision for the last few years largely beneath the mainstream press's radar.

During that process, he's built a cult, but not really an audience - and that's likely to remain the situation as long as Woods stays faithful to the kind of text that leaves the average Globe (much less Herald!) reader scratching his or her head. But what can one say before the face of honest obsession, especially an obsession as charming and intelligent as this? Like earlier Beastiaries, Dream of Life offers high-quality design (on a shoestring) and inventive movement, and ponders the intersection of life and art with a seriousness that's all the more effective for being lightly rendered. But again as usual, it somewhat subsumes the distinctive atmosphere of its putative author in a generic whimsicality that has become the Beasts' trademark.

In a way, this is integral to Woods's technique, which is one of pastiche. It almost doesn't matter which author he chooses (Carroll, Stein and Lorca are hardly comrades-in-arms), the collage he comes up always seems to play at about the same level, and to the same end. This is partly because, no doubt due to local casting exigencies, he's generally working with a new ensemble of actors with each production (and he gets them to nearly the same place each time, but no further). And in Lorca's case this effect is more pronounced than it was with Stein and Carroll, because the Spanish author doesn't entirely share their affinity with the innocent children's theatre in which Woods sources most of his work. Lorca is simply more sexually lyrical (at left, with Salvador Dalí during their affair), with more of a sense of death's impending presence, than Woods or the Beasts seem to realize.

What's more, the evening feels particularly bumpy because the source material is fragmented even by the Beasts' usual standard. The central text, Play Without a Title, is also a play without a second or third act, and the performance's "coda" is a brief scene pulled from the likewise-incomplete The Public. Written near the end of Lorca's tragically short life, these are at least aligned in their concerns: both are surreal, meta-theatrical debates about the meaning and responsibilities of theatre. In between these two conceptual puzzle pieces, however, are a series of poems, dialogues, and scraps of text, and the relationship of these experiments to the larger questions posed by Play and Public remains, I'm afraid, pretty murky. Still, they often charm, and Woods as usual conjures evocative images throughout. And there are at least two strong performances here, from Mauro Canepa and Tyler Peck, although generally the acting is less accomplished than in previous Beast productions. I must report, however, that the audience didn't seem to mind all this - indeed, they were clearly engaged by the Beasts and by Lorca, and almost everyone hung around after the show for one of the most thoughtful talkbacks I've ever experienced. Perhaps there is an audience for the Beasts' brand of theatre after all - and maybe they're finding it, show by show.

A long look at Gertrude Stein

Ack! It's catch-up time, review-wise; how have I managed to let five shows and concerts pile up behind me without comment? Plus I'm afraid I have to begin with another post-mortem, this time for Look and Long, a "Gertrude Stein miscellany" from the highly imaginative Imaginary Beasts. The Beasts, under the direction of Matthew Woods, have developed a small cult for their particular brand of intelligent whimsy, and Look and Long did not disappoint the group's fans: it was quirkily diverting throughout, and given its source in the famously opaque writings of Stein, this was no small feat.

Although the particular chapter of Stein's oeuvre that the Beasts performed, Gertrude Stein's First Reader, was, believe it or not, designed for child's play. The First Reader (ironically enough, among the last of her written works) sprang from Stein's realization that she had long been toying with the basics of language and meaning in the way a young child might. Thus the "plays" of the Reader take the form of literal "play" - personae morph at the will of infantile desires; elementary fairy tales take loose form, then vanish, only to re-appear in what feels like an ongoing dream; half-absorbed dramatic forms turn into innocent parodies of themselves; and very large, unanswered questions about meaning often float just beneath the surface of the babbling text.

Fittingly, the Beasts were clothed (mostly) in nighties and pajamas, and cavorted on a set made of blackboards, on which primer-like words and phrases had been scribbled (a door built into one allowed them to emerge at times directly out of Stein's language, a nice touch). As usual, Woods and his actors consistently charmed, and the evening never lost energy or focus - still, like the Beasts's Lewis Carroll evening last summer, Look and Long felt like more of an introduction to the Beasts' usual style than to the precise meaning of Stein. That two shows from such dissimilar authors (Carroll follows language into paradox, while Stein bangs away at its building blocks) should feel so similar to each other in mood and effect indicates to me that the Beasts sometimes cuten up, rather than listen carefully to, their sources.

Still, isn't it refreshing to have anyone at all risking a show based on Gertrude Stein? And it was equally exciting to be introduced to so many new actors, none of whom I think I've seen before. The stand-outs in terms of presence and technique were James Patrick Nelson and Aimee Rose Ranger, but there was poised, effective work from Veronica Barron, Theo Goodell, and Kiki Samko - essentially the entire ensemble. Their energy and inspiration made it easy to look long at Look and Long.

Next stop, Wonderland

Elizabeth Pearson, Jennifer O'Connor and Amy Meyer go down the rabbit hole.

Plenty of people haven't noticed, but there's a loose network of smart young actors working in Boston now - they're not loyal to a single troupe, but you'll find some of them most nights at the Piano Factory, or with Whistler in the Dark downstairs at the New Rep, or in the latest production from Way Theatre. Right now you can find a covey of them roosting at the Calderwood Pavilion in Imaginary Things, or, Treacle from the Well, a new show from the fledgling troupe Imaginary Beasts. Inspired by the classic Alice in Wonderland books, and written and directed by the (heretofore-unknown-to-me) Matthew Woods, Impossible Things aspires to be "an experiment in theatrical nonsense," in the manner of the Reverend Dodgson's grand experiment in literary nonsense. Whether Mr. Woods fully succeeds in that ambitious aspiration I'm inclined to doubt; still, his show is a surprisingly charming entertainment, marked by delicately evocative design and ingeniously poetic movement.

Indeed, as my friend Art Hennessey has pointed out, the costumes are the real stars of this show. Designer Cotton Talbot-Minkin (write that name down, local producers) clearly knows just what she's doing - her bio lists five British pantomimes among her designs - and she has beautifully colorized, and slightly eroticized, the essential look of John Tenniel's original imagery. No one's listed as set designer, but it should also be noted that the simple scaffold-and-curtain upstage works beautifully with both the costumes and Brent Sullivan's imaginative lighting - and the bow on the package is the inventive soundtrack (again uncredited) which mashes up everything from Dark Side of the Moon to that song you always hear on the calliope. In short, the design here is of a sophisticated piece, and often operates at a visual level (above right) you'd expect from a theatre with ten - or a hundred - times this one's budget.

Still, whether the text measures up to this vision I'd say is an open question. Like many a show inspired by a classic, this one is inevitably shadowed by its source, the actual Alice books, and Impossible Things sometimes feels like a smart tour through a Bennington or Vassar term paper, with an attendant, enthusiastic air of "Isn't this totally cool?" Which it is, definitely - I'm just not sure what the Imaginary Beasts have brought to the party that's actually new - and some things about Alice which I feel are central to its experience have mysteriously vanished down the rabbit hole.

For Alice, of course, is not so much whimsical "nonsense" as intellectually penetrating "non-sense," that is, a strange exploration of the conundrums slithering like slithy toves within the confident construct of our discourse. Carroll famously dithers between mathematical and linguistic logic (a topic in little evidence here), and a salient fact about Alice - that many people forget - is that frustration and anger are always banging about in it, violence is often incipient, and the sunny languor of its heroine is shadowed by the suppressed, pedophilic paradox of its author: i.e., that any congress with his dream girl will shatter the very quality that attracted him. To further explore these themes at the level of the source is one "impossible thing" that's probably too much to ask of Imaginary Beasts; still, some original extrapolation of Dodgson is the question the production begs, isn't it?

Instead, we get a poetic, lightly ironic gloss on Alice's addled, victimized femininity (there's only one boy in the show, the versatile Jordan Harrison). The script loosely follows the fate of "Mary Ann" - an obvious doppelgänger for Alice, Mary Ann was the White Rabbit's unseen maid, with whom he confused Alice at the opening of her Adventures in Wonderland. Mary Ann's identity, as conjured by Imaginary Beasts, turns out to be multifoliate, to say the least, as she endures travails similar to her literary sister's - summer storms, surreal tea parties, mysterious train trips, and other curiouser misadventures lead to a final encounter with the authorities (and perhaps even death) in what looks like a shadowy spider web.

But if at times the show meanders (sans, I'm afraid, the books' famous dream logic), it's still punctuated by striking imagery: the repeated appearance of a Magritte-like portent of death, twirling a parasol and trotting like the White Rabbit, was a particular favorite of mine, as was that summer shower, and a brilliant tableau vivant of a Tenniel illustration from Through the Looking Glass (above left). The show's individual performances were sometimes nearly obscured by the stagecraft, but there was still strong work in most episodes. Eliza Lay - who's now kind of the reigning queen of the fringe theatre scene - was, as usual, a standout, although she seemed a bit too ruminatively self-aware for either Alice or Mary Ann (or was the idea that Mary Ann was Alice all grown up? I wasn't sure). She may have been overshadowed, however, by Jennifer O'Connor, a mainstay of Whistler in the Dark, who was deployed in a dizzying array of roles, from a frog to a sheep to Marilyn Monroe (a thematically extraneous moment, I thought, but O'Connor pulled it off). Amy Meyer and Elizabeth Pearson, always light on their feet, provided enthiastic back-up in a similar variety of personae. This troupe certainly has great potential - but next time I'd like to see them deploy their skills - and Mr. Woods's visual talent - on an actual great script, rather than an also-ran of their own devising.