A man (Andrew Shulman) gets caught up in a Kafka-esque mystery in EPONA’S LABYRINTH (photo by Hunter Canning)
HERE
145 Sixth Ave. (enter on Dominick St.)
Through April 23, $18
212-352-3101
www.here.org
Pitting the individual against a nameless, corrupt bureaucracy, Epona’s Labyrinth creates a Kafka-esque world where nothing is as it seems. On an otherwise ordinary evening, a man watches as a green ambulance takes his wife away in the middle of the night. Desperately trying to find her, the man ends up in a bizarre hospital filled with odd people and strange rules, never able to get a straight answer out of the doctors, patients, nurses, or even the priest. Every time he thinks he is getting somewhere, he is suddenly sent off track, into vignettes that involve, among other things, a masturbation device, a crazed lawyer, and a nurse who was born in the womb of a cow. Carrying around his briefcase, he is the perpetual everyman, lost in the glare of surveillance cameras and nonsensical regulations. The story, written by Ivana Catanese and director Kameron Steele and inspired by the writings of Kōbō Abe (The Woman in the Dunes, Secret Rendezvous), consists of some scenes that advance the plot, while others increase the overall mood of paranoia that dominates the play but feel extraneous. The characters make great use of a four-paneled screen that becomes a cube, turns into a zigzag, or folds out into a wall upon which abstract videos are projected or silhouettes peek through. An elevator scene is particularly effective in bringing together the plot and the technology, while others just seem to show off what is possible. The cast is led by solid performances from Sophia Remolde as the head nurse, Davina Cohen as a patient searching for her missing daughter, and Andrew Shulman as the befuddled husband. A collaboration between the Brooklyn-based South Wing Theatre Company and the Japanese multimedia art collective Nibroll, Epona’s Labyrinth, which features choreography by Mikuni Yanaihara, video by Keisuke Takahashi, sound and music by SKANK, costumes by Mitsushi Yanaihara, and lighting by Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa, is an inventive but flawed examination of the twentieth-century dilemma of the hapless individual vs. the all-too-pervasive power structure.