Manicomio

Reviewed by Bill Raden

RECOMMENDED:

Zombie Joe’s Underground has long been L.A.’s premier stage purveyor of psychological horror. The theater’s signature production, Urban Death (whose current incarnation closes May 31), remains a viscerally potent iteration of the subgenre’s first tenet: That which is unseen is far more spine-chilling than that which is visible in the light of day.

Manicomio, director Sebastian Munoz’ captivating follow-up to last January’s Zombie Joe-directed Nightmares, represents the second chapter in ZJU’s experimental probing of psychological horror’s second tenet: The truly frightening is that which is unspeakable but which is present in the deep emotional scars and half-remembered life traumas that mark us all. (Manicomio, by the way, is Spanish for madhouse.)

As it happens, the unspeakable is also a very apt description of good art, which strives to show rather than tell, and in Manicomio’s 13 loosely connected and discomfiting, company-created pieces woven from song, choreography and text, the unspeakable takes center stage in what might best be described as 13 highly theatricalized nervous breakdowns.

The show’s most emblematic metaphor comes during the preshow, when the ensemble directly intermingles with the audience and engages in informal banter that is continuously broken by a discordant clang, during which the actors freeze mid-sentence until a subsequent clang releases their paralysis and they continue as if uninterrupted. This show, the gesture implies, is concerned less with what is literally being said than with the interstitial meanings that lurk between the words.

What follows ranges from the eerily haunting (Jessica Weiner witnessing key moments of her life as a disembodied specter) to the mordantly harrowing (Jackie Lastra as a little girl whose good thoughts about her friends are systematically poisoned by dark suggestions from her homicidally-inclined doll) to the manically sardonic (Leif La Duke singing a winsome love-ballad to his beloved Lisa that turns increasingly disturbed and plaintively desperate) to the outright megalomaniacal (Tyler Koster channeling his despair and feelings of isolation into the messianic delusion that he is “the prophet”).

The commanding Joaquin De La Rua (performing a stunning, flamenco-accented lamentation) and Kevin Van Cott (who provides live musical accompaniment costumed as a polar bear) are merely two standouts (Jared Adams, Charlotte Bjornbak, Jahel Corbán Caldera, Ramona Creel, Samm Hill, R. Benjamin Warren and Anne Westcott round out the finely tuned ensemble) in an evening that eloquently testifies to the continuing, risk-taking vibrancy of ZJU’s creative reach.

Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri., 8 p.m., through May 23. (818) 202-4120, zombiejoes.tix.com.