Three performances last week proved that you can never predict an emperor by his clothes — or, what’s below the surface may only be surface. Unless, that is, there’s fire under the skin. If I sound unusually fanciful, that’s probably because I’ve been immersed in the loopy stanzas of Gertrude Stein and the paranoid heroics of doomed adventurer Donald Crowhurst.

The profound surprise of the week, maybe the season, was Steve Mackey & Rinde Eckert’s Ravenshead, an auspicious visitor from San Francisco, at the Boston Conservatory Theater. Performance piece, opera, monodrama, whatever you call it, the work was one of the most satisfying theatrical experiences I’ve had in a long time.

With only a few transpositions — the English Donald Crowhurst becomes the American Richard Ravenshead, and his boat Teignmouth Electron is redubbed the Photon — Eckert’s libretto is based on the chilling story told in Nicholas Tomalin & Ron Hall’s 1970 book The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. A self-deceiving extrovert who failed at about three professions before the age of 36, Crowhurst set off, at the end of October 1968, in an ill-prepared trimaran to compete in a singlehanded around-the-world sailing race. Everything went wrong from the beginning, and eight months later his boat was found adrift in the Atlantic. Crowhurst was missing but his logbooks revealed his astonishing scheme to fake a winning course he never sailed. Eckert and Mackey explore the gradual disintegration of Ravenshead’s mind during his floundering journey.

A big man, soft as a landlubber but powerful, Eckert-as-Ravenshead is overconfident at first, bragging to admirers and badly needed investors about how sure he is of winning. Victorious, he plans to market sophisticated gear he’ll be trying out on board — a navigational device, a gadget to improve the self-steering system, a special electric generator. None of these things will, it turns out, work properly. The trimaran has faltered on its sea trials and there’s no time to fix or redesign it. Ravenshead secretly hopes his wife will talk him out of the expedition, but she thinks she should support whatever he needs to do.

Rinde Eckert is the lone actor throughout — the words and singing of the wife are recorded. Mackey’s clanging, atmospheric score is played by six members of the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band. Eckert sings, talks, rages, and scrambles around the ingenious set (by Alexander V. Nichols), a very sketchy but functional semblance of a three-part hull, cockpit, and rigging. He hauls on cables, puts together a mast and climbs it, swings on the boom during a storm, slams down worthless pieces of equipment.

Starting out, he sees himself inscribed alongside Ferdinand Magellan and Yuri Gagarin in the roster of the world’s great explorers. He assures his radio contacts that he’s fine, and later, when he realizes he’s getting nowhere, he calls in the coordinates of a phony route. Things get worse, and his clear operatic tenor rises to a crazed falsetto as he reviews his options: give up and apologize, keep going and if necessary row the life raft to Australia, pray for a miracle. None of these is viable. As the lights finally go out, he’s singing a rakish madrigal and clinging to the top of the mast.

Most commentators think Donald Crowhurst deliberately abandoned his boat and his life. As Eckert portrays him, Ravenshead hasn’t lost heart at the end. Although all his resources are exhausted and his reason is shattered, he’s still himself, still hanging on and defying the elements.

Besides Eckert’s gripping performance, what was so fine about this production was the complete integration of music, design, lighting, and libretto. Shaped and textured for a contemporary sensibility, Ravenshead nevertheless built an emotional experience for the audience, the way good theater always has.

GERTRUDE STEIN and the early modernists hacked apart the old theatrical verities and decreed that sense making, emotional catharsis, and audience empathy are not the purpose of art. I admit that I’ve never appreciated the charm of Stein’s gelatinous prose. But Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera Virgil Thomson set in 1927 to Maurice Grosser’s arrangement of her lines, has become an icon of the avant-garde, and attention had to be paid when Mark Morris brought it to Brooklyn Academy as part of his three-week 20th anniversary season.

The reputation of Four Saints may exceed its actual effect. It’s had very few performances since its premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1934, one of several fabulous coups de modernité pulled off by the Atheneum’s director, A. Everett (Chick) Austin. The premiere was a guaranteed scandale, first because of its all-black cast (it was directed by John Houseman and choreographed by Frederick Ashton). And then the haut-bohemian audience traipsed up from New York in the dead of winter to inspect the piece, which coincided with the opening of the first Picasso retrospective in the US. It’s been talked about ever since by some of the fanciest talkers in the business.

Four Saints is less a dramatic progression than a series of tableaux in which St. Theresa of Avila — played by a soprano and a contralto — plus St. Ignatius Loyola and a whole lot of other real and imaginary saints palaver about whatever saints talk about. Various mundane manifestations take place. St. Theresa paints Easter eggs, rocks an imaginary baby, sees a Heavenly Mansion through a telescope.

Gertrude Stein said the saints weren’t supposed to move, but, like everything Stein said, that ought not to be taken literally. Thomson’s score, a pastiche of operatic gestures, snatches of hymns and American folk songs, also resists the long continuities of choreographic movement, but it does suggest both momentous and intimate developments. It seemed Mark Morris would have a field day with all this seriously avant-gardist nonsense. But he chose a much more conservative and I think dampening approach.

First of all, rather than deploy a single cast of actor-singers, he segregated the chorus, orchestra, and eight vocal soloists, conducted by Craig Smith, in the pit, and reserved the stage for his 14 dancers. In the interest of lucidity I guess, he eliminated several characters from the dance scenario, so that the basic structure consisted of two solo dancers (Michelle Yard and John Heginbotham) and an ensemble. With Maira Kalman’s backdrops and wings painted in big, childlike floral designs, the production framed itself like a conventional opera or ballet.

Aside from a few mimed incidents, the choreography disregarded both the sung libretto and Grosser’s description of the action, consisting instead of lots of neat, formal dances that might have been stuck into just about any opera. There were even quasi-romantic duets between St. Theresa and St. Ignatius, with lifts and supported poses, that might be mistaken for something more than spiritual exaltation.

Photographs of the original production reveal “tropical” decors and costumes that anticipated things Katherine Dunham took to Broadway a decade later. But there’s also a feeling of overabundance in these pictures. The textures and groupings, colors, objects, and detail on that stage must have matched the word blitz of the text and ultimately suppressed the audience’s longing for rationality.

Mark Morris seems to have gone for a more generalized and comprehensible impression of the text. His company dances matched the rousing, jolly, and tender moments outlined in the music. Michelle Yard sped and soared through all the action as a luminous St. Theresa. The dancing wasn’t unpleasant, but it didn’t capture the score at all for me. I mean that Thomson’s bizarre and brash projection of what is so precious in Stein’s text has an integrity, an assurance born of absolute faith. (For Lloyd Schwartz’s assessment of Four Saints in Three Acts, see page 21.)

OVER THE WEEKEND a curious entity called Aeros arrived at the Emerson Majestic as part of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. I did know that the performers were members of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, but three hotshots of modern dance (David Parsons, Daniel Ezralow and Moses Pendleton) were listed as “directors,” and the “creative team” included Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, the inventors of Stomp. So I thought there’d be some actual choreography to the show, or showmanship. Wrong.

It consisted of what seemed like æons of flips, handstands, cartwheels, balancing acts, women doing 6:05 splits and rubberband backbends, women standing on their heads and waving their legs like upended bugs, and more flips and cartwheels. There was some old mime shtick. The big number featured an egg-shaped plastic tubular cage that the performers artistically squirmed around in and leaned out of. Throughout the two-hour show, canned music went gung chiga GUNG chiga gung chiga chiga chigagung.

Since there were no specific indications of separate choreographic ideas, it was hard to tell what the distinguished directors and advisers may have contributed. For those who like this kind of athletics, there are competitions and gym-team demonstrations on TV all the time, with fewer arty frills to get in the way.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001