Lusthaus (1914)

This is one of those inter-disciplinary performance pieces that find their natural milieu in Fringe Festivals — just as it's exactly the sort of demi-spectacle upon which successful Fringe Festivals thrive. And, bless conceptor-director Gabe Johnson, it delivers a nicely Fringe-y blend of sensory and intellectual exhilaration.

A bare platform in the backroom at InkTank. A handful of well-placed, well-used white lights. An avalanche of sound and music, mostly 19th-century, designed by Heather Brown. Four chairs. Four bodies — two women, two men — appear in (and out of) muslin-white costumes, designed by Hannah Dringenburg to suggest turn-of-the-20th-century under-garments.

Johnson and the four members of the company devised and polished the series of precise movements. Here it's lyrical, sensual, even sleepy. There it's designedly crude, even clumsy. Often there's an edge of threat, even doom.

Is it theater? Not in any expected sense, though there is a script of sorts. Nor is it quite dance. It's more a living, moving gallery exhibit that makes — then artfully breaks — its own rules.

The bodies become fluid sculpture. The words spoken might be descriptive paragraphs pasted to walls beside objects in a museum.

Back in 1986, dancer-choreographer Martha Clarke presented Lusthaus: Vienna in New York, using music, snippets of disconnected dialogue by historian and playwright Charles Mee and semi-dance movement patterns to investigate the spirit of Vienna in 1900 — a time when old disciplines and restraints were crumbling, when of-the-moment sensory experience was all that seemed to anchor or comfort society. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich greeted the piece with enthusiasm. In 2003, Clarke revisited the idea with less success in Washington, D.C.

Now Johnson and company, using similar movement concepts and some of the script from the Clarke event, revisit Vienna at a later date, 1914 — when World War I simmered on the wind and would soon sweep away the last structures and strictures of the old empire. It was a time, Johnson said, "when men were finding voices and roles in a new society" and when "women who had been held down by society were freeing themselves through sexual means."

Whether all that is put on view in a performance of Lusthaus (1914) is not actually important. Plenty is on view. At times the piece is rife with that sort of relishing nostalgia people can have for times and places they can't actually remember. At other times the piece eliminates detail and exhibits pure emotion shorn of context.

Johnson and most of his company are products of the theater program at Northern Kentucky University, where Lusthaus (1914) was created and presented in workshop performances this spring. The company members are Josh Beshears (who also appears in another Fringe 2007 entry, Stephen Hunter’s On Edge), Katie Kershaw, Michael Stone and Jen Spillane (who appeared in her own solo show, Virtue, in the 2006 Cincinnati Fringe). Grade: B+

— Tom McElfresh