Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue

WNEP’s Soirée DADA, its recurring series of nonsense cabarets, has become the company’s signature product (look for—no joke—a holiday edition this winter). This remount of Metaluna, first produced a dozen years ago and billed as “the world’s only Dada play,” might provide a glimpse at the seed that put down WNEP’s Dada roots; it plays out like a Soirée with (kind of) a plot.

In the early 20th century, Dr. Carlton Twist is obsessed with brains in the academic-study sense (but possibly also in the hungry-zombie sense). Desperate for live experiment subjects and with the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Twist enlists a European Dada performance group to travel to the States to put on its show in Metaluna, Indiana. There they find the dimwitted, anger-prone mayor engaged in his first contested campaign; his opponent is his own protofeminist daughter.

If you’re having trouble seeing how one plot point connects to the next, welcome to Dada. Janes’s script doesn’t aim for cohesion so much as some hooks on which to hang the ridiculous. Like the Soirée series, Metaluna is chockablock with clever absurdist set pieces performed by an engaging cast and with a fair deal of audience participation (I unwittingly made my first onstage appearance in some time). But the variety-show Soirées work because their performers establish personalities as opposed to characters, which then can be plugged into dissonant scenes; here Janes creates actual plotlines but then refuses to resolve them. Dada devotees might applaud that, but for most of us it’s less Dada than deflating.