Engrossing, bewildering, provocative, vivid and unrelenting -- that's just a few of the reactions generated by Quantum Theatre's production of "The Task."
Written in 1980 by maverick, avant-garde playwright Heiner Muller, "The Task" had its opening night performance Friday at the Gage Building in the Strip District.
The Quantum Theatre staging uses this now-defunct industrial space for an imaginative environmental staging that conducts audiences through its huge open expanses punctuated by concrete and steel support beams to a series of performing areas that fit the emotional or narrative demands of each scene.
That's important, because Muller's play resists linear interpretation. It's a collection of scenes loosely defined by the narrative's progression in time.
The action begins sometime circa 1812, with a sailor delivering a letter to Citizen Antoine, a former provocateur of the French Revolution, who now attempts to distance himself from any Republican involvement that might cause him trouble with the new politics of Napoleon's empire.
Years earlier, in the optimistic heat of the French revolution, Antoine had dispatched three men -- Gaullodec, Debuisson and Sasportas -- as emissaries of the French Assembly to incite a slave rebellion in Jamaica. The mission failed.
The remainder of the 90-minute, intermissionless performance reveals that failure in a series of scenes that best resemble a fever-fueled dream, complete with appearances by a forbidding Angel of Despair.
Jed Allen Harris directs a thoroughly accomplished and committed cast who bring stark believable reality and consequence to the proceedings.
Larry John Meyers, Larry Powell and Tony Bingham portray the aristocratic Debuisson, the peasant Galloudec and the African former servant Sasportas charged with the task of fomenting revolution. Mark Conway Thompson appears as Antoine.
Tami A. Dixon represents multiple symbolic characters -- the Old Woman of the failed revolution, First Love and Treason -- and Shammen McCune looms reprovingly as the Angel of Despair.
Scenes proceed with the familiar logic of a dream where everything or anything makes sense at the time.
Silent, beret-wearing guides urge audience members from one living tableau to the next. Sometimes we're seated. Sometimes we stand.
Scenes occur in places that include a double-sided freight elevator, between pillars and behind a chain-link fence. They're enhanced by a gigantic, carnival-type puppet; talking heads; scenes of commedia dell'arte and combat; and at least two scenes -- one male, one female -- of full frontal nudity.
This only seems bizarre later when you try to organize and rationalize the evening's succession of impressions.
Maybe that's because, like those dreams, Muller and "The Task" expect the audience to do the work of constructing the images, exchanges, symbols, visual and textual clues to extract meaning and significance.
Revolutionary zeal evaporates. Ideals are abandoned. Hopes are betrayed.
Use it to examine who you are as a person or who we are as a society, if you dare.
Additional Information:'The Task'
Produced by: Quantum Theatre
When: Through May 9 with performances at 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays
Admission: $28-$40; $16 for a limited number of students
Where: Gage Building, 30th Street and Liberty Avenue, Strip District
Details: 412-394-3353 or website
