Three visions

MA & PA At Home is a hoot

by Bill Rodriguez

MA & PA AT HOME: A Series of Multimedia Art and Performance Art featuring Flow, by Heather Henson; 11 Degrees of Evan O'Television, by Evan O'Television; and Alphabets for the Melancholy (A Play for Language On a Sinking Ship) by Che Le Momo. At Perishable Theatre through March 14.

Heather Henson in 'Flow'

Ma and Pa sure are worth visiting at Perishable Theatre these days. They're thought-provoking, they're fun and they sure as hell ain't boring. MA & PA at Home, a presentation of three multimedia art and performance art offerings, is a hoot and a smile this year.

Evan O'Television is premiering 11 Degrees of Evan O'Television, his latest hilarious venture into small screen multiplicity, having turned his habit of talking to himself into a career. In addition, there's a lyrical movement piece by Heather Henson, which choreographs innovative puppetry to an ecological theme. And Che Le Momo premieres his latest play, an avant-garde embarcation into language and dawning awareness.

O'Television, whose folks know him as O'Sullivan, is familiar in the Boston area for what he calls his "Technological Vaudeville." In the tradition of Burns & Allen and the Smothers Brothers, his pieces are comic dialogues. But, in the tradition of small casts for small theaters, he holds both sides of the conversations.

They end up having an entertaining argument over the half-hour, even before the time machine comes into play. As the piece's length indicates, it has enough layers unfolding to keep us engaged past the initial novelty. Curtain up, his black-and-white talking head greets us, and we're thrust in a private world of self-doubt and bravado. That can make for a tension with some mileage, if life at large is any evidence. He's taping the day before we're seeing this, he says, and he's calming his nervousness by constantly reminding himself that he can always edit out what doesn't work. Of course, since he evidently hasn't, that's one issue that comes up when his present-tense version steps out and starts reprimanding him for his irresponsibility.

Funny stuff. What gives it more substance than a stand-up comedy routine is that this is all such a meaty bone to gnaw on. The pretext for the piece, an adaptation for the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, can fade into the background while we get caught up along with "them." The two Evans demonstrate the travail of post-modern living, fraught with self-conscious regard for the past and with issues of identity in an age where celebrity is a virtue in its own right. Don't worry: that stuff is mostly show rather than tell. Pretext is replaced by subtext.

In the course of things, Evan refers to criticisms that his previous pieces have been overly self-involved, maybe even solipsistic. Well, if this one is typical, let's hear it for self-regard. As far as our collective cultural neuroses go, 11 Degrees adds up to a lot more than a one-man show.

The most beautiful performance at Perishable in a long while is Heather Henson's Flow. Less a dance than a movement piece, it nonetheless doesn't stint on the grace and beauty. Depicting a wetlands ecology, the set is thick with rushes and reeds. Henson's black-and-white drawings of estuary life come alive as an animated film projected onto a sun-like circle stretched taut with thongs, like an Indian drumhead. As images of ripples in still water appear, the rustle of tall grasses becomes part of the movements by Henson, Melissa Hensley and Maggie Lloyd. Puppetry comes into play as the performers assemble a crane from natural objects and give it elegant life. Flow is a gentle and lovely work that is likely to echo in your imagination long after the performers take their bows.

The opener is Le Momo's surreal poem Alphabets for the Melancholy (A Play for Language on a Sinking Ship). It is a fascinating, if obscure, examination of the wellspring of verbal and written creativity. Actually, the image is more oceanic than that. A ship's captain (John Holdridge) is up a rope ladder, peering intently off through a spyglass. Dawn rises -- danced to haunting theramin music by Maureen A. McGovern, who then stands behind the large yellow disk that beams down on the proceedings. Three sailors in white jumpsuits (Tom Hurdle, Matthew A. Lowe and JoHannah Ash) declare, "Say farewell to right and reason," as the playwright goes on to wean us away from such left-brain concerns.

The floor is littered with letters, and at one point the "ABC Spirit" (Le Momo) comes out and sprinkles more from a basket, like rose petals. Many of the recitations are litanies ("This is the way the windfall clutches the x-ray touches"), so the words, meant to evoke more than to mean, are easy to let flow through you. The imagery is effective, mostly a glaring white, as if were squinting at the sea of pre-consciousness, that font of creativity.

Alphabets is a brave creation that doesn't overstay its welcome and that keeps up a sense of humor from the outset. For me, its extended metaphors are too loosey-goosey (light is like inspiration -- oh yeah, and we cant read without it, either) to illuminate as intended. But then too, the virtues of many surrealist artists have yet to dawn on me.