Unsettling 'Perpetuity' an enduring delight

It is rare that the action of a play takes place entirely at night. It makes the viewer a bit queasy to walk out into darkness when the play is through--you're not quite sure if you're walking back into the world you left or the world the play has created for you. After In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, the experience is even more unsettling. The play is a tour de force of intensity and dissolution--a drama of paranoia unfolding in a series of rooms shrouded in the kinetic darkness of late-night Manhattan toward the end of the 20th century.

Eric Overmyer's In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, one of the Dramat's fall experimental productions directed by Christopher White, TD '98, plays through this Saturday at the Yale Repertory Theatre. The plot traces the experiences of several individuals involved with the Montage Publishing House in New York City, an agency that supplies ghostwriters to write conspiracy exposés. In particular, it focuses on Christine Penderecki (Nicole Caccavo, TC '98), a young editor whose first assignment at Montage is to ghostwrite the forthcoming novel by `Mr. Ampersand Qwerty', an author who secured considerable fame and renown in the world of white supremacist conspiracy fiction with his previous work, ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), a manifesto on what he believes to be the Jewish conspiracy in America. Christine's sequel shifts the focus from the Jewish community to the Asian community in a Fu Manchu-style exposé on the underground world of Asian corruption. As the action of the play unfolds, the characters are drawn into a web of paranoid decadence and conspiracy theory, and it becomes increasingly difficult for them to separate their own personal identities and beliefs from the subjects they are commissioned to write about.

But to describe In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe in this way is to be hopelessly reductive--despite its chronology, the narrative defies linear time at every turn and serves as a tremendous montage. The action is punctuated with frequent monologues and lapses into fantasy. At times, it is difficult to follow--actors play multiple characters, the dialogue is quick and often interrupted, the action is layered and fragmented. But the confusion produced is intentional, and as the play progresses, the fragments coalesce into a mosaic of identity confusion and paranoia.

Every aspect of this production drives home the feeling of a world where the floor is falling out from under us--the stychomachiac dialogue, the frantic energy of the actors, the multiple levels on which the action takes place. The set, a scaffolding-like series of interiors with subtle gradations of light and atmosphere set on a black-and-white world map, is spectacular. The set is so powerful, in fact, that it threatens at times to swallow the actors--it provides variation of level and light, but the individual spaces are small and seem to cause some degree of technical difficulty in staging. The actors, however, remain charged with energy and intensity from start to finish, with some especially notable performances. Caccavo conveys the controlled collapses of her character in a high register but never slips into monotony, and Marisa Matarazzo, SM '99, brings rich physicality and an almost maniacal intensity to all three of the characters she portrays. The original music by Jesse Dillon, TD '98, adds an additionally haunting quality to an already eerie environment.

Director White commented that he was originally drawn to Overmyer's script because of its prophetic quality. "I was fascinated that Overmyer was writing this script in 1987 dealing with American paranoia about Asia, focusing especially on the Great Basin/Plateau area of the United States," he said, "We are hearing so much about that today in light of all the white supremacist militia groups in the West." In addition, White was drawn to Overmyer's synthesis of pop culture and weightier themes.

Indeed, these are the qualities that make In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe so gripping. Christine and Dennis, played by Duc Luu, MC '99, play a macabre but hilarious game, forming lists of B-movies and famous missing persons. Coupled with dramatic readings of chain letters, and recitations of crazed conspiracy fantasies, the script risks sounding slick and without substance. But Overmyer uses this repetition cleverly, so that the litanies take on a new meaning with each new variation. In addition, the actors deliver the monologues with a creative and kinetic punch that saves the catechisms from ever becoming tiresome. In a script that risks cacophany, a harmony of paranoia emerges.

In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe is a difficult play to watch and to analyze--in its atmosphere of moral confusion, viewers search for characters who are simple sell-outs or genuine believers. There are few such anchors in this production, but the ambiguities have a symmetry and a reality that forces you to question your reliance on the black and white, and temporarily buy into the unsettling world in front of your eyes.

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