Pure War/The Madness of the Day

The Alchemical Theatre, the resident company of the adventurous Theaterlab, has conjured up an arresting collage of experimental theater in "Pure War/The Madness of the Day." The show uses texts taken from the works of two French writers, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the late novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. For the most part, the texts provide a series of fairly oblique monologues that meditate on mortality and other facts of life as well as on the cascading speed and dangers of the double-edged advances of technology in contemporary life. The invention of the car also brought the invention of the car crash, we are told in one of the more comprehensible passages.

But more compelling than the texts themselves are the visual imagery and intensity of performance they inspire in director Carlo Altomare and his five actors: Chelsey Clime; Andrew Greer; Gia Lisa Krahne; Zebedee J. Row, and Katarina Vizina. Performed in what is little more than a small room with a stage at one end, the show holds your attention with its imaginative theatricality. The design of the playing space changes in surprising ways—low tech but still surprising. Often the performers play behind a high board, revealed only from the chest up, like hand puppets. The effect is like watching Kukla, Fran, and Ollie cutting up in some piece of Dadaism. But it's chilling at the same time.

At one point, we see the seemingly bodiless head of Krahne being held in the hands of a stern-looking authoritarian Vizina as Krahne describes in French what seems to be a terrifying interrogation while Andrew Greer listens carefully before giving a line by line translation. In another section, Clime, carefully made up and looking like a cosmetics-counter saleswoman, delivers a scarily somnambulistic rendering of nocturnal feelings and images.

In perhaps the most engrossing sequence, Row packs a lot of emotion and humor into a fierce depiction of a prisoner tallying up day by day his time in jail and the days' various happenings.

Adding to the avant-garde ambience is the offstage music, composed by Altomare and Zak Sherzad, filled with pounding piano and various squeals and clanks. This avant-garde blend may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's an admirable brew.

Presented by the Alchemical Theatre at Theaterlab, 137 W. 14th St., NYC. Dec. 7–17. Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, or www.alchemicaltheatre.com.