STAGE REVIEW : MOCA’S ‘ZANGEZI’ GETS LOST IN THE RHYME AND REASON

The new Museum of Contemporary Art is a glorious and blessed space, and the reader with any interest in being reconciled to the art of his century needs to get up there. MOCA’s first theater event, “Zangezi,” is a less bountiful experience.

This is director Peter Sellars’ staging of a “supersaga in 20 planes” by the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922). It is first performance since Khlebnikov’s colleague, Vladimir Tatlin, read it to an audience in a Moscow museum some months after Khlebnikov’s death.

“Zangezi” was hard to keep in focus on Wednesday night.

One was reminded of the Symbolist drama that starts off “The Sea Gull,” to the fidgets of the other characters. A play of voices, set in the void.

Zangezi (David Warrilow) is a poet-seer who sits on a mountain and delivers rhapsodic sermons on everything under the sun, in a language that features lots of made-up words. (Translator Paul Schmidt has great fun finding English equivalents.)

It’s not clear whether this preacher has a flock or preaches to the wind. But this time he does have two listeners, played by Ruth Maleczech and Rod Gist. Maleczech is sympathetic, but on the whole, they would rather be “entertained” than enlightened.

That’s the action of the play, except for a coup at the end that shouldn’t be revealed. Obviously, it’s not a play about action, although Sellars has devised some events to keep the show moving ahead, such as sending Warrilow out on a not-too-high high wire.

Sellars and his designer, George Tyspin, have added another touch as well. The characters are street people, sleeping under a fire escape --the “mountain.” It would have been easy to go all the way and make Zangezi a speed-freak or a crazy. Warrilow doesn’t present him that way. His language is bizarre, but in control.

Language is the gist of the evening, and a half-hour of it is fascinating. (Sellars and the company have taped a 30-minute slice of “Zangezi” for radio broadcast later this winter.) For instance, there’s Zangezi’s extended riff on the letter “M,” a letter with mystical significance, apparently, for poet Khlebnikov.

“Now is the coming of M! Mightlings and masochins! Michness of muchness! Mogo-guru! Magic mogasm! Major motion picture!” Warrilow speed-raps the passage without a breath (is it on tape?) and we catch the fervor of a man who has talked himself into thinking that he’s creating language all over again, stripping away the false syllables of the past and getting back to the primeval sounds of truth.

Perhaps we’re touched by the revolutionary romanticism behind all this, and by the realization of what happened to so many avant-garde Russian poets and painters once Stalin had taken control of the state. (Translator Schmidt was co-author of the Mark Taper Forum’s “Beautiful Lady,” which traced that process.)

But in the MOCA auditorium (a beauty), Zangezi’s unmoored musings take on a repetitive, adolescent tone after a time, even with an actor as distinguished as Warrilow crafting the words. “I discontent you, ocean! You discontent me!” ’I am the master carpenter of time!” Not theatrical time, alas.

Oddly, this is the second Russian Futurist play that’s been reconstructed in Los Angeles, the first being “Victory Over the Sun” at the County Museum of Art during its “The Avant Garde in Russia: 1910-1930” show in 1980. There, too, it proved difficult to translate, not so much the language, but the shock of the original work. We watch this one with respect; we learn something from it, but it remains a museum piece.

‘ZANGEZI’ A dramatic poem by Velimir Khlebnikov at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Staged by Peter Sellars. Music Jon Hassell. Sets and costumes George Tyspin. Audio Stephen Cellum. Lighting consultant Stephen Bennett. Production stage manager Gweneth Hawes. With David Warrilow, Ruth Maleczech and Rod Gist. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with 2 p.m. matinees Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets $15-$20. 250 S. Grand Ave. (213) 626-6828.

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