THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

"I have a weakness for hyperbole," our feisty heroine announces early in the play, little suspecting how much of it playwright/scholar Howard Barker—bad-boy founder of the "Theatre of Catastrophe" in 1970—has in store for her. Indeed, so brimming with iconoclastic fury is this retro-diatribe on the status quo—yours, mine, anybody's—that it belongs in a time capsule.

The problem with that idea would be deciding in what year it should be interred: its source material is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1767 romance entitled Minna Von Barnhelm, or, The Soldier's Fortune, in which a young woman and her betrothed are reunited after being separated by war and philosophical differences ( the latter springing from our damsel's "experience with books" ) . Barker's rendition, however, incorporates a catalogue of motifs in vogue since the late 1950s, including nudity, cunnilingual rape, incest, floggings, suicide, asphyxiation, group-gropes, puppets, masks, jungle drums, pre-Raphaelite gods, femme fatales garbed in slinky gowns, entourages swathed in shadowy veils and corpses splashed with Grünewald-gangrene paint. Amid the orchestra of Grotowskian agony—lots of bellows, screams and writhing on the ground—is an oasis of Brechtian detachment in the form of Minna's uncle, the Count Von Bruchsall, who offers simultaneous ringside commentary on the action.

If the actors in this Trap Door production dared to let us in on the joke for an instant, Barker's tantrum would collapse like a circus tent in wet snow. Fortunately, director Nicole Wiesner and her athletic cast have had years of expertise at this brand of roll-on-the-floor-and-stick-out-your-tongue social analysis, diving feet-first into each isolated moment and not surfacing until an offstage crash, or some other nebulous sound effect, signals a switch in conscious dimension—say, from 18th to mid-20th century ( assisted by Beata Pilch and Nevena Todorovic's protean costumes ) .

This Trap Door production also marks the American premiere of this entry in Barker's prolific canon. Playgoers demanding a map through its mosaic structure and labyrinthine theorizing are advised to consult a written text, the better to bask in the prodigious spectacle supplied by the ensemble of physical and verbally agile players. And if you occasionally succumb to flashes of déjà vu—whether they be of Peter Brook or Mel Brooks—nobody has to know but yourself.