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In one dimly lit room, a woman flinches from the aggressive snap of a yellow jump rope, trying to remember how to breathe. In another, a condemned heretic whispers blasphemous tales under the sinister amber glow of a huge rose window. Theatre Labyrinth presents two spare solo works, one ruefully comic ("The Nowhow"), one spooky ("The Sibyl"), to open its Loon Tree Festival at Pilgrim Church in Tremont.
Though both pieces are disciplined and professional, it's "The Sibyl" whose images linger like a disturbing dream. That's helped in no small part by the memorably apt performing space: a chilly tower room with cracked plaster at the end of a long winding staircase at the top of the church. There, every creak and moan Brett Keyser makes is amplified by the echo of the vaulted ceiling and bare wood floor.
Like much of Theatre Labyrinth's work, "The Sibyl" is basically literary narrative, stories within stories told by a spellbinding performer, made theatrical by director Raymond Bobgan's facility for conjuring images from simple objects. This time, the performance is based on Swedish Nobelist Pär Lagerkvist's morally ambiguous tales of divine intervention and indifference. Aided by two pieces of cloth -- a white scarf and a large quilted blanket -- Keyser plays a defiant heretic who morphs between two other characters tormented by their special relationships with God. First there is The Wanderer, a man who feels himself under an eternal curse; his haunted features appear like a wraith under the veil he slowly sews closed over his face. Then there is The Sibyl herself, a strange, oracular woman who speaks from under the shroud of the quilt.
Tall and dark, with glittering eyes and a voice that moves easily from whisper to song to shout, Keyser knows how to command attention through his ghostly 35-minute tale: you could hear a pin drop in the unheated space. (Warning: dress warm, and come on time; there is no late seating in either performance.)
Opening the bill, Jenny Magnus's one-act "The Nowhow", a guest performance from Chicago's Curious Theatre Branch, borrows from cartoon and silent comedy to explore a woman's "pratfall epiphany". It opens with a long recorded hiss -- part oceanic murmur, part snore, which eventually can be understood as the sound of a woman breathing.
Based around a longish anecdote about learning to play basketball in an all-writers league, "The Nowhow" explores the paradox of being centered and in-the-moment. To theatricalize the monologue, Magnus builds a choreographed vocabulary of gestures and sounds that represent inner states, interspersed with abortive jump rope routines. "How can I be more 'hmmmm' when mostly all I feel is 'pow' and 'prrrrpt'?" she grimaces.
Though she describes herself as "a going-on-forty writer who lives in her head", Magnus is an accomplished physical comedian. She also has a lovely singing voice, but in the echoing space it's hard to hear the words to her nursery-rhyme songs. The piece, which runs through Saturday, is slight but engaging, and has a playful charm.
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