MNEMONIC
John Jay College, 899 10th Ave. between 58th & 59th streets. Through May 24.
WOW! All the lights went down. We had to put on a mask and recall last Sunday and then autumn 1991 and then when we were 6 years old. We had to picture our grandparents and their ancestors stretching behind us ad infinitum. Then we took off our blindfolds and examined a leaf in great detail, noting the way the stalks resembled human ancestry. Very deep, dude!
Then, after this prelim, the story began. It’s an intertwining of various tales that hint at truths about human memory and human desires. We are in “Mnemonic,” a play conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, artistic director of the London’s Theatre de Complicite, and performed by the company.
It’s a Euro-hippie outfit that has bombed here with “The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol” and “The Chairs,” but at least offers energy and satire this time.
Two main stories are told: the finding of and subsequent speculation about the Iceman, a fairly well preserved corpse from 5,000 years ago, high in the Alps in an area disputed by Italy and Austria. A young woman called Alice searches for her father in today’s Eastern Europe.
There is constant speculation about the pasts of these people. There are other mysteries, too: What became of the Italian music teacher in 1941? What became of the Greek taxi driver born in Turkey?
All these stories are told in a fragmentary mode that mingles live and recorded voices, clothed and unclothed beings.
McBurney, the initial lecturer in a blue suit, becomes a pair of characters in the play.
He’s Virgil, the London boyfriend of Alice; he calls up a friend and bewails her indifference; he strips and walks about, restless, and has long telephone conversations with her.
He walks nude through the Eastern European bedroom she occupies. He also is the naked Iceman and lies stiff on a table (the Iceman is also played by a chair). There is a certain humor in all this carrying-on that defrays the glum message of the play.
Alice, played with sharp, desperate intensity by Katrin Cartlidge, goes East hunting for dad, who may still be alive. She learns from a reporter that she is carrying a tallith, a Jewish cloth (was her father a victim of the Holocaust?); she gives the reporter a necklace of very old stone that is like what the Iceman was carrying.
We’re all the same! The thing ends with a commemoration of the love of ritual slaughter and the countervailing love of life and freedom that can both be seen (and remembered) in all of mankind. It’s not a great or profound play, but it’s an entertaining, gripping spectacle.