The Gods Are Pounding My Head! | Through Sun. April 17

A black metal contraption bellies out from the rear wall in Richard Foreman's The Gods Are Pounding My Head! A great stove? It'll slide and reveal a draped doorway; skulls clog lopped pipes, so the set may be a boiler room. The small steam engine will run its decidedly short track, and mushrooms sprout under an industrial chute, another short run the play's axe-wielding lead trio will use.

Wherever Foreman's got us ("a planet moving around the sun" comes up several times), he's aimed away from today's most blatant peril: Last year's King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe was Foreman's traipse into Bushworld. Our reigning avant-garde theater vet keys the more general malaise that's allowed political travesty; his voice-over chafes that "people were just, you know, thin somehow, just surface only." Dutch (Jay Smith, who played the daftly threatening Rufus) is its early, strapping locus in a gambit that gravitates audience sympathy amid the restless Foreman omniverse. To rest in one place; is that not to say being easier to upend? Dutch takes and retakes his breath, peering high before speaking—then hits the floorboards like a felled sequoia in Pounding's largest (but by no means last) fall.

Boon companion Frenchie (T. Ryder Smith), also in tall black boots and a knotted red kerchief, calls down to his pal to "Hang in there, Dutch." Frenchie's gaze simmers with defiant melancholy, and when Maude (Charlotta Mohlin) appears, all tensile glances that steel when she's not cutting them adrift, this expertly played caroming bout of mismatched, sidelong glimpses becomes the galvanizing "dance" on Foreman's gushing and emptying stage.

The plexi-shields are almost all down since tight, caustic 90s plays like The Mind King and Benita Canova's gritty quest, and Foreman's announced that, after decades of his manic, superbly consternating plays, he's moving to assemble a film bank. If Pounding's his swansong, its conclusion is fitting tribute: as heartening as it is based on a hopeless quaff, and as visually sumptuous as they come, while going dark, dark, dark…

Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 E.10th St. (2nd Ave.); 212-533-4650; Tues., Thurs.-Sun., 8; $20/Sat. $25.

—Alan Lockwood