Prayers to Broken Tin Foil

This is the way the year began--with what, by any standard, qualifies as a loud theatrical bang. No sooner had most of us unpacked our boxes than Erik Amblad was on stage in "The Hollowmen," an adaptation of the famous poem by T.S. Eliot.

And it's strangely appropriate that the show's title is slightly different from the title of Eliot's poem, "The Hollow Men"; this show is Eliot, distinctly skewed. The words of "The Hollow Men" are only the starting point for "The Hollowmen," a loud, extravagant, psychedelic play that feels very much like a live music video.

Eliot's poem is a fairly short one, and all of "The Hollowmen" comes in at under 45 minutes. But in that time, artistic director Mark O'Maley does just about everything you can do with a stage draped in tinfoil, a strobe light and an actor in a metallic suit. Briefly, what happens is this: as the poem is heard on the sound track--mixed and looped, sped up and slowed down, intermingled with classical music, rock, and a pounding techno beat--Erik Amblad performs a highly elaborate pantomime, in which his only prop is a large red chair.

There's no doubt that the show is a tour de force, for performer and designers alike. Amblad is the only thing to look at for the whole length of the show, and it takes a lot of nerve to do what he is called upon to do. At one point, he twitches his mouth in sync with a train whistle; at another, he pretends to be electrocuted as we hear a loud buzz; towards the end, he actually bangs his head and face repeatedly into the seat of his chair, and he does it hard, so that we can hear it. The part, if one can call it that, requires athletic strength, a strong stage presence and a lot of endurance; and Amblad had it all.

But the man on stage is only one part of this show. Even more important is the soundtrack, in which Eliot's poem is made to undergo transformations he couldn't have imagined, and probably wouldn't much care for. Here, too, the sheer achievement is impressive; sound designer Amar Hamoudi prolongs a poem that would take five minutes to read aloud into a rhapsody of sound. Hamoudi, along with O'Maley, creates a series of moods based on the speed and intonation of the speaking voice, enhanced by various beats, snatches of music and random snatches of speech. (Some fragments of "The Waste Land" also find their way in.)

When the soundtrack becomes frantic, Amblad quivers and throws himself on the ground; when it becomes hushed and mysterious, he assumes an inscrutable expression. That coordination of sound and action is the work of choreographer Dana Gotleib, whose achievement is also formidable; she's designed 45 minutes of motion that's neither dance nor acting, but something in between.

Once the spectacle of "The Hollowmen" has been duly appreciated, however, there are still some important questions to be asked. For example: why this poem, when the music and action have almost nothing to do with the text's mood and meaning? It quickly becomes clear that the spirit of "The Hollowmen" is based on a shallow, but understandable, misinterpretation of the poem, whose repetition of certain apocalyptic words and images--"broken," "death," "dream," "hollow"--can make it seem merely psychedelic, the precursor of Jim Morrison's lyrics.

It is in this spirit that the techno beat, weird light effects and eerie pantomime are intended; the best that can be said for it all is that it's trippy. The poem itself, by contrast, is very delicately nuanced, so much so that it can be read simultaneously as the nihilistic sequel to "The Waste Land" and as the first stirring of Eliot's Anglican religious poetry. Some of the images Eliot uses--such as the "multifoliate rose" and the quotations from liturgy--prefigure his highly devout late poems, the "Four Quartets." That's certainly not the idea that one gets from "The Hollowmen," which, as far as I could make out, doesn't actually include the entire poem, instead focusing on some of its most vivid, garish passages.

In other words, the show does not try to dramatize the poem, but uses the poem as one element in a collage of weirdness. A more serious problem is that mere weirdness doesn't allow much variety or development; so that this show, short as it is, can seem very long. Towards the end, as the techniques that were once startling--head-banging, repetition, shouting--became familiar, I found myself longing for something genuinely risky--a violent gesture, or a vulnerable one, anything that would seem like a payoff to all the build-up. Instead, the show's climax is a laughable quotation from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, as if the famous fanfare could create drama in an essentially static piece.

So "The Hollowmen" doesn't have the sophistication, or the rewards, of "The Hollow Men." For that matter, it doesn't offer the conventional pleasures of a play, or the concision and fluidity of a music video. What it does provide is live spectacle, tremendous technical accomplishment, and a trippy atmosphere. Which isn't bad for 45 minutes, and the first week of school.