The New York Times-20080124-No Map Needed for Reality-Altering Trip- -Review-

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No Map Needed for Reality-Altering Trip; [Review]

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Looking for the travel agent of your dreams, someone to fly you out of the muddy rut of midwinter monotony? Allow me to suggest Richard Foreman, a man whose slogan, spelled out in a ravishing new show called Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, gets right to the point: Go to other places. And, boy, does he make sure that you do.

Mr. Foreman is celebrating his 40th anniversary this year as the creative force that is the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, one of the most enduringly fertile bastions of the New York avant-garde. As befits a man who came of artistic age in the 1960s, his goal has always been to take people on mind trips, the kind hymned by the Beatles in Magical Mystery Tour and the Who in Amazing Journey.

Yet there's nothing quaint or retrodecadent about Mr. Foreman's phantasmagorical work, which is as disciplined as a Balanchine ballet. As is made clear by Deep Trance Behavior, which runs through April 13 at the tiny theater at St. Mark's Church in the East Village, Mr. Foreman has distilled what's noblest in the impulse that four decades ago propelled a generation to turn on, tune in and drop out.

While Mr. Foreman, 70, still shares that youthful urge to open new doors of perception -- both philosophical and sensory -- he has devised a purely nonpharmaceutical and increasingly sophisticated means for achieving his goal. Deep Trance Behavior portrays vaguely vampirish people regularly placing pills on their tongues with medical precision. But the true reality-altering tool here is nothing more nor less than the show itself.

Some of Mr. Foreman's methods of disorientation have changed in recent years. He continues to create his singular fun-house sets, a metaphysical pack rat's rooms of words and images that can never be taken in with a single glance. (Deep Trance motifs include pianos, funeral urns and Victorian photographs of mediums summoning ectoplasmic spirits.)

As always there is a core of robotic young performers in clothes that appear to be plucked from an era-scrambling time machine. And, oh yes, Potatoland? That's been part of Mr. Foreman's imaginary geography at least since the 1970s.

But in the past several years he has added digital film sequences to the mix, projecting flat, luminous scenes of actors in moody tableaus that both echo and contradict what's happening onstage. For Deep Trance he has visited two locations, in Japan and England, and shaped the play as a sort of travelogue, filled with gnomic advice and dicta. These are either spoken -- by the filmed or live performers, or by a sepulchral, amplified voice that belongs to Mr. Foreman -- or projected in titles on-screen.

Here are a few of the more memorable tips: Only being a tourist can one experience a place. And conversely: The visitor is always dead amidst the excitement of the experience. And: Do not forget those who travel to a place from which there is no return.

Interpret these aphorisms and admonitions as you like; their meanings seem to change each time they're repeated anyway. But there's one declaration that is unconditionally clear, at least by Foreman standards, No relationship exists between what happens onstage and what is happening on the illuminated screen, except -- suddenly -- click -- and a profound relationship does now exist.

He's right, you know. That is what happens, as the lights -- on the stage -- behind the screen and even in the audience -- keep shifting to force you to readjust your focus. The process is matched aurally by the melting collage of songs and speech in an assortment of languages that plays throughout.

Mr. Foreman's goal is to make boundaries bleed, to erase the frame, as the voice instructs the audience. And not just among different cultures, but also between different periods and different levels of thought -- even, as those seance photographs suggest, between the living and the dead. Deep Trance is, like most Foreman productions, just more than an hour long, and seems to occur out of time.

The five members of the live ensemble -- all sultry young women except for Joel Israel, who sports a pinstriped suit and blood-sucking fangs -- could have been summoned from the past or the future. The same might be said of the somnambulistic English and Japanese people on screen, who have been arranged into poses in stark corridors and sometimes bring to mind the elegant, cryptic souls of the vintage-voguish French film Last Year at Marienbad.

The filmed performers are given to ending their utterances (phrases like mental activity, plus nobody home) with the words, knock, knock. And the implicit plea in repeated words most often heard as the beginning of a joke sums up what Mr. Foreman has always asked of his audiences: to open up their senses to admit a change-stirring wind.

At one point Mr. Foreman's voice is heard saying, Do not dismiss, please, the possibility that very soon one evening in this series of evenings, it may happen that a single individual present at this very performance may, he or she, lock into the evening's fluctuations.

That hope is what has kept Mr. Foreman's art so vital, and it is not misplaced. Even the most stolid theatergoers are unlikely to visit Potatoland without being transported, at least fleetingly, to a place that was always within them, even if they never knew it was on the map.

DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND

Written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman; sound by Mr. Foreman; technical director, Peter Ksander; stage manager, Brendan Regimbal. Presented by the Richard Foreman Theater Machine and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Mr. Foreman, artistic director; Shannon Sindelar, managing director. At the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; (212) 420-1916. Through April 13. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.

WITH: Joel Israel (Man in Striped Suit), Caitlin McDonough-Thayer (Girl in Sailor Hat), Fulya Peker (Girl With Black Hair), Caitlin Rucker (Girl With the Golden Dress) and Sarah Dahlen (Girl With the Tiara); and the taped voices of Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim and Andre Malraux.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Deep Trance Behavior: in Potatoland The play is at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. E1); Fulya Peker, standing center, among the other cast members. The avant-garde production is a sort of travelogue of locations in Japan and England.; Richard Foreman is celebrating his 40th anniversary this year as the creative force that is the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. E8)