Black Moon Theatre tackles the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the Flea (photo by Steven Pisano)
The Flea Theater
41 White St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Sunday through September 25, $20-$30
866-811-4111
www.theflea.org
www.blackmoontheatrecompany.org
Italian-born American actor Alessio Bordoni, who has previously adapted François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and has appeared in works by Diderot, Levi, and Dante, turns to The Tibetan Book of the Dead for his latest piece, Bliss, an eccentric, idiosyncratic, underwhelming, and woefully self-indulgent multimedia production continuing at the Flea through September 25. The audience enters the theater at the precise start time as “part of the experience,” scurrying around for seats (it’s general admission), perhaps noting that two performers are already onstage, lying on each other behind a scrim. Soon Charlotte Colmant rises slowly from atop Alessio like a spirit leaving a dead body; both are topless, with Alessio wearing Butoh-like white-chalk makeup. For the next sixty minutes or so, Alessio, in an overly bold and dramatic voice, recites lines about attachment, impermanence, aspiration, suffering, delusion, and enlightenment while veins pop out all over his taut body and Colmant dances beautifully yet ultimately repetitively. Meanwhile, Estella Dupree’s amateurish designs of fire, mysterious figures, and Spirograph lotuses are projected onto the scrim — at one point interrupted by a computer cursor trying to move to the next image — and Amaury Groc’s score drones on, from John Carpenter-like synth horror music to bland New Age melodies. Alessio’s character is in the bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth, contemplating his past and future lives, but it’s hard to really care about his fate. Black Moon Theatre Company artistic director René Migliaccio (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Bordoni’s Ponzi, a Dollar and a Scheme) is a proponent of what he calls “expressionistic realism,” but he is unable to find “the intensity of emotion and the lyricism of the movement” that is the third tenet of that discipline. Finally, the show’s website features four pretty cool photos, including the one above, that actually look very little like the actual impression produced by the performance, so beware.