'The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (a k a Lumberjack Messiah)':
Lumberjacks Get the Blues in Foreman Land

January 19, 2005
By BEN BRANTLEY

Behold the mighty lumberjack, standing tall in his garb of disheveled black tie and pearls. Watch as he raises high his ax, poised to strike a felling blow. See the ax slip from his hands, tumbling to the ground with a quiet thud, as the woodsman just stands there, empty-handed and empty-eyed. Come to think of it, he has been looking awfully tired and shaky, like someone who would rather be under the covers than in the forest. Besides, he keeps hearing these eerie and discouraging voices in his head.

Even lumberjacks get the cosmic blues in the world of Richard Foreman, the mind-roiling warlock of avant-garde
drama, whose latest - and possibly final - play opened last night at his longtime artistic residence, the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church in the East Village, where it is scheduled to run through April 17. The title this time is "The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (a k a Lumberjack Messiah)," a classic name from a writer whose other works include "My Head Was a Sledgehammer" and "Panic! (How to Be Happy)."

In other ways, too, "The Gods Are Pounding My Head!" is entirely typical of Mr. Foreman, the ultimate theater auteur. This show is the customary extravaganza of tightly orchestrated hallucinogenic visual effects, bruising slapstick and intense, cryptic lines that suggest a philosophy student after too many sleepless nights of books and Benzedrine.

But there is something subliminally different about this production. An elegiac note extends from the funereal black that dominates the crazy-quilt set to the look of depletio in the faces of the central characters. "Gods" is as
majestically mad and funny as any Foreman spectacle, but it also leaves you feeling more than a little sad.

This is not inappropriate for what appears to be a farewell note of sorts. Mr. Foreman has said he is giving up the kinds of plays he has been creating since 1968, as the Florenz Ziegfeld of downtown theater, to focus on film.

And so, for this valedictory production - written, directed and designed, as always, by Mr. Foreman - he has created a splintered portrait of Dutch (Jay Smith) and Frenchie (T. Ryder Smith), two ineffectual lumberjacks who are ready to hang up the woods-clearing tools of their trade. Anyway, like all of the bewildered big-picture seekers in Foreman Land, they have never been very good at seeing the trees for the forest.

But while the subject of "Gods" may be philosophical fatigue, the show is hardly lacking in the electric theatrical energy expected of Mr. Foreman. As is his wont, he crams onto his pocket-size stage more carefully choregraphed frenzy and eye-popping bedazzlement than are found in most Broadway musicals. His sinister funhouse set is even more replete than usual with oversize toys, from a locomotive (on a very short track) to a sliding board.

The regulation enigmatic, wild-eyed beauty (named Maude, to evoke the girl in the Tennyson poem, and embodied most beguilingly by Charlotta Mohlin) is again on hand to bedevil the boys and to share their fears and frustrations. The signature Foreman chorus of gnomelike, identically clad creatures run on and off the stage, looking like crosses between bellboys and harem girls, while serving up props like giant black Fabergé-style eggs and effigies of crowned heads without bodies.

The Messrs. Smith are terrific in summoning the exasperated, futility-stricken Foreman prototype in different, exceedingly stylized ways. Dutch is a big lu with a wilting voice; Frenchie is a lean, stone-faced fellow with a deadpan Scottish drawl. Along with Maude, who laments the absence of real men, they ride the train (and simulate copulation with it), become stuck on the sliding board and stagger beneath the weight of giant military medals. Like all Foreman characters, they also hurl themselves against the walls and fall down a lot.

The elliptical, disjointed text - spoken live by the performers and in godlike recorded voice-overs by Mr. Foreman - mixes nursery rhymes, Victorian poetry and assorted philosophical postulations that are offered with tentative hope and immediately evaporate. A sense of disgust with a society without substance informs much of what is said. The disembodied voice speaks of how people of "depth and intricacy" have been replaced by others who are "just surface only" in a "brand-new, paper-thin world."

Throughout his long and influential career, Mr. Foreman has compellingly used purely theatrical surfaces, from
variations on commedia dell'arte characters to papier-mâché props, to uncover seething depths. In his hands, a silly-looking, homemade playhouse has been turned repeatedly into a limitless cosmic playground made for exploration and getting lost.

It is hard to imagine the same sensibility working quite as well in film, which is necessarily a more literal-minded medium. In the meantime, theatergoers used to getting high on Mr. Foreman's annual productions are likely to feel withdrawal pangs for years to come.

'The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (a k a Lumberjack Messiah)'

Written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman. Managing director/production manager, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli; stage manager, Anthony Cerrato; technical director, Paul DiPietro; music and lights, Mr. Foreman; costumes by Oana Botez-Ban; props, Sarah Krainin; sound by Daniel Allen Nelson. Presented by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. At St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.

WITH: Jay Smith (Dutch), T. Ryder Smith (Frenchie) and Charlotta Mohlin (Maude).