The Oregonian A&E - April 2004
Tense Dave potent mix of physicality and psychodrama
THE OREGONIAN A&E
April 2004
By Catherine Thomas
“Near the end of Tense Dave the aptly named protagonist masterfully played by Brian Lucas lies in a rigor mortis stranglehold on the stage, his body and face stricken in pasty-cold terror.
His psychological train wreck has been building speed for an hour, set on a centrifuge of horror: a rotating stage that obscures and reveals sinister characters and brutal deeds, glimpsed through half-ajar doorways and moving chamber walls.
Tense Dave which received its American premiere at Portland State University's Lincoln Performance Hall on Thursday evening and continues tonight, is the work of Australian dance company Chunky Move's artistic director Gideon Obarzanek. He collaborated with acclaimed theater director Michael Kantor and choreographer Lucy Guerin to create this creepy psychodrama of a man trapped in existential and physical vertigo.
Tense Dave mines the trio's considerable gifts in one of the most arresting works of physical theatre seen on the Portland stage in recent seasons.
Think your neighbors are wackos? Dave's are a nightmare: a dapper tyrant (Brian Carbee) with a maniacal cackle and a foot fetish; a slacker psychopath (Luke Smiles) who experiments on things living and dead; a Victorian trash-romance junkie (Kristy Ayre) with a split personality and unhealthy delusions; and a suicidal paranoiac (Michelle Heaven) who seems to want to be brutalized even as she cowers in terror.
Sucked into their twisted dramas, Dave and his fragile psyche embark on an ultimate bloodbath soaked in Obarzanek's sense of morbid comedy.
The stage is a brilliant sleight of hand, a macabre merry-go-round whose walls move seamlessly and silently, creating a maze of interior rooms where extreme fantasies play out: heaven's bedroom, where she attacks imagined intruders or trusses herself up in elaborate suicide contraptions; Carbee's den, from which he murmurs to and photographs his feet or bellows orders; Ayre's dressing room, where she corsets herself in period garb and wields a candelabra through a fantasy scene that ends in rape; and Smiles' lair, a laboratory for asphyxiation experiments that he leaves to stalk victims.
As the stage rotates, their isolated lives pan past, and Dave enters the unyielding clutch of a dark dream that refuses to let him wake. All become fodder for each other's deranged fantasies, some hilarious, others brutal.
At one point, with a single finger, Heaven dances an epic of murder, imprisonment and escape, and chainsaws and knives embark on a bloody rampage in an assault scene of masterfully gruesome sound effects.
The choreography has the actors replenishing weaponry from severed limbs in an endless blood-for-guts massacre; the sounds of squishy disembowelment and bloodletting are amplified to grisly effect.
Dave has few pure-dance scenes, but this is an ensemble of gifted physical actors. Lucas, in posture and stumbling movement, embodies a sad sack besieged by events out of his control.
The ominous tock of a time bomb the audience hears is the sound of Dave's psyche -- at once savage and vulnerable -- about to implode.”