Postcards from beyond the grave are blended bits

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'Tongues,' 'Savage/Love' 11 p.m. today and tomorrow Earle Ernst Lab theater, University of Hawai'i-Manoa $7, $6, $3; 956-7655

After all, the Sam Shepard plays that we'll remember and puzzle over are hard-edged, realistic debunkers of the American dream, plays like "Buried Child" and "The Curse of the Starving Class." Besides being a playwright, Shepard is also a media figure, with an Oscar nomination for acting in "The Right Stuff," a tabloid-exploited marriage, and dreams of being a rock musician.

So it's only academically interesting that before his public success, Shepard hung around New York's avant-garde Open Theater, where he met director Joseph Chaikin and later collaborated with him to create "Tongues" in 1978 and "Savage/Love" in 1979. Performed together, the pair of one-acts play in less than an hour.

A result of improvisational exercises, the original performances featured Chaikin as sole actor, reciting all the poems and speeches for fractured voices, while Shepard, seated behind him, improvised accompanying percussion. It was a beatnik-like, coffeehouse style of bongo drums and elliptical imagery.

"Today the people talked without speaking.

"Tonight I can hear what they're saying."

Directing both works for UH's Earl Ernst Lab Theater, Allyson Paris keeps their flavor, but dresses them up with a cast of six and a prominently featured disembodied puppet.

"Tongues" is filled with voices from the living and the dead, no real characters but fragments of attitudes gleaned during an out-of-body experience. Paris adds a central figure, called up from the audience by a cell phone, then covered by a sheet while five other actors join in reciting the lines. A spirit-like white puppet passes among them, eavesdropping.

"You are entirely dead.

"What is unfinished is forever unfinished."

The voices explore universal experiences — birth, work, hunger, and belonging — but provide no answers to aid the transition between life and death. There are postcard messages from beyond the grave and a buffet of hackneyed theories, but in the end listeners must make what sense they can from a kaleidoscope of words.

"Savage/Love" is a circular arrangement of similar snippets, which explore romantic attraction, and the fear of loss. Each segment of the work has a spoken label: First Moment, Tangled Up, Babble, Acting, Absence, and Hoax. As the six performers form interchangeable pairs, the end takes us back to the beginning, in which the voices agree to continue without feeling, but still tremble with anticipation.

Megan Braverman, Chris Doi, Tracyn Hagos, Kristy Miller, Lei Sadakari, and Danel Verdugo make up the acting ensemble, speaking in chorus, writhing on the floor, and sustaining a clear vocal rhythm.

For a casual theatergoer, the performance is best accompanied by something hot, bitter and laced with caffeine.