"Throw a Bucket of Ice Water on Your Brain"

Theater Review from the New York Times:

WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD!
[Written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman. Presented by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Mr. Foreman, artistic director; Shannon Sindelar, managing director. At the Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; (212) 352-3101. Through April 1.]

Those among you who presume you are still alive might be interested to know that Richard Foreman is throwing a funeral for you at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church....

“Wake Up” is Mr. Foreman’s second film-theater hybrid. Even more than his first, “Zomboid!,” presented last year, it shows how this priest of the theater has embraced his old adversary only to disarm it. Mr. Foreman creates beautiful filmic pictures for his audience’s consumption. But he refuses to let us wallow in them.

The theory at work would seem to be that we have come to trust too much in the surfaces of artfully arranged pictures and information. Hooking the mind to such surfaces, Mr. Foreman says, is fatal to the unconscious. (“When the world sees itself, it doesn’t,” says a line from the script.) While “Wake Up” is clearly a bid to resurrect theatergoers’ deeper imaginations, the elegiac undercurrent that courses through the show suggests its creator worries that he may be too late.

As usual Mr. Foreman has converted the pocket stage at St. Mark’s into a three-dimensional version of the puzzle drawings in children’s magazines in which objects are hidden in dense mazes of images. The not-so-still-life of the set (everything seems to keep moving, even when it’s not) includes a boxing ring, veiled mannequin heads, books that appear to be climbing the walls, funereal vases of flowers and a propeller airplane with a cargo of plastic baby dolls.

Though the five live performers onstage (four clad in sinister regulation black, one dressed as an aviator) would seem to have plenty to occupy them in this attic of the mind, they are inextricably drawn to the outsized filmed images that hover behind them. And why shouldn’t they be? The people in the film, which was shot in Lisbon, are elegant, cryptic, depressive souls who speak in riddles, bringing to mind the chic denizens of European art-house films from the early 1960s.

As anyone knows who has spent time amid the animated billboards of Times Square, most people — given a choice between looking at life on a screen or at the real thing — will choose to watch the screen. So with “Wake Up,” one’s (shameful) instinct is just to sink into the movie.

No chance of that, though. Mr. Foreman periodically brightens the stage lights to the point that the filmed images bleach into nothingness. Sometimes question marks or X’s cover the faces of the speakers. The live performers open panels in the movie screen, revealing electric candles within.

This constant shifting of attention between two artistic worlds keeps you in a state of perceptual anxiety. Every time you are forced to refocus, whatever you see appears to be freshly reconceived. Despite the fuguelike repetition of images, sounds and words on and off screen, nothing feels fixed.

“Zip between this,” says a voice, “always double procedure.” I can’t remember who said that, whether it was a live performer or a film actor or one of those deep, disembodied voices. The line is typical, though, of the hortatory text, which seems to be trying to rally its audience into rebellion against complacency.

“Here is a world trying to run faster than the unconscious mind,” says the voice (Mr. Foreman’s, as it happens). The actors in the film, whose heads are often covered in newspaper shrouds, keep repeating the words “Maybe it will happen in my lifetime.” Is this the voice of hope or despair? It’s worth noting that they are also given to intoning, “Tick tock, tick tock; it’s broken and it can’t be fixed.”

Both sets of actors have a tendency to fall down, which is always true in Mr. Foreman’s productions. They also all brandish cards, plates, pointers and knives, which they hold suspensefully above their wrists, as if on the brink of suicide. The most haunting filmed images show women, stretched out on tables, who appear to be dead.

You’ll be happy to hear that these women’s eyes eventually flutter open. An optimist could say that Mr. Foreman is portraying a rebirth of unconsciousness — a dying that is actually, as the title promises, a reawakening.

Maybe. But as exhilarating as “Wake Up” is, it is also steeped in melancholy. Usually with Mr. Foreman, snatches of music summon the comic frenzy of silent movies. This time the aural backdrop is darker: a mixture of ringing cellphones, a wandering plaintive soprano and a hushed percussive beat that suggests an advancing army. “It can’t be fixed” is the mantra that stuck in my head.

But that’s probably just my unconscious mind talking. (Yours may have a different opinion.) Hey, that means it’s not dead after all. Mr. Foreman appears to have done his job.