Amniotes‘ Imaginary History is a Sometimes Glorious Catastrophe

“The Irrealist Theater (TIT) defines Irrealism as the subjective use of established, empirical truths for the auspices of awesome and aberrant circumstances,” we are told, rather offhandedly if not completely sensically. Their play, Amniotes: an Imaginary History of the End of the World from 1954 – 20XX, is showing through August 28 at Implied Violence’s warehouse (2115 5th Avenue). The title probably gives it away, but its audience is the adventuresome or deranged.

Parts of the evening are really awful (the acting is variable); other parts slip the surly bonds of Earth and briefly fly. (There are going to be a number of bird metaphors in what follows, so brace yourself.)

As befits a not-fully-fledged company, there’s a substantial amount of unconventionality, awkwardness, and experiment on display in this their maiden flight. A doctor (Meredith Binder) comes out and lectures to you for about 15 minutes as the show begins, on amniotes and irrealism, and this produces a “coyote tedium” (in that gnawing your arm off as a distraction is an option).

However, playwright/director William Brattain is not without ideas, or ways to dramatize them to unusual effect, and once the play truly begins you may find its blend of scifi absurdity and drawing-room apocalypse strangely rousing. Clara and Chance are wearing caked-with-whitewash clothes (her a dress, he military fatigues) and replaying a scene where he enters, home from the war, and they bicker (over whether they can have a child, or whether she’s slept with another man).

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She bakes a number of pies, he tosses a basket of eggs to the floor. Behind them, a non-whitewashed Clara and Chase are projected doing the same thing, in advance a few seconds. It’s an imaginary 1954. Are they ghosts? (This is a question they ask themselves.) Later they will advance in time to the present day, and try to raise their young from eggs. It’s freeing, to hear Clara tell it. Chance takes up crochet.

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Brattain wants to postulate an evolutionary grapevine move, where mammals confront their extinction by trying the egg thing again, and this creates a rich visual environment, as relationship devolves to literal egg-carrying, and you think of that high school “get ready for pregnancy” game. If early humans of the ’50s were slaves to nature, today it’s the capabilities of science (in the form of Binder’s doctor) that structure our lives. All for the eggs.

It all ends in a cataclysm of course, as the feral, resource-starved world outside the bird-ridden house comes crashing in.

And in the end, the play is a bit like one of those chicks that never pecks its way out of its shell, or manages too late. There’s a powerful sense of late-stage anxiety that’s captured in the overwrought formal experimentation and self-conscious Artistry on display (a musician named DiTolvo plays a yowling theremin in the corner). Strip away the throat-clearing, and this play manages to bind up global warming, sexual alienation, cultural gender shifts, and the drama of visceral life into a wildly unstable being–like watching a cartoon character realize its about to explode, and then you’re hit the face with a shred of someone’s spleen.