Highway to Tomorrow

by Jason Zinoman

Don’t be fooled by the self-important title, which sounds as if it had been written by the same sloganeer who cooked up Bill Clinton’s “Bridge to the 21st Century.” Elevator Repair Service’s Highway to Tomorrow is about the least pretentious adaptation of a Greek tragedy you’ll ever see. A spin on Euripides’s The Bacchae, this insanely inventive production includes phallic puppets and a silly soundtrack of whip cracks and ritualistic party music. The chorus, played by James Hannaham, dresses in a costume covered with packets of soy sauce and speaks high-pitched gibberish. But things don’t get really goofy until the cast turns its back to the audience and performs certain butt-movements that seem inspired by Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura movies. This is downtown avant-garde by way of that other Clinton — George: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

While one could easily get completely distracted by the show’s shenanigans, the stellar cast also manages to create a few mesmerizing and revelatory moments that stick with you long after the ass-play. Director John Collins and Steve Bodow powerfully stage the climactic confrontation between Dionysus (Randolph Curtis Rand) and Pentheus, who in this version happens to be a Philadelphia native named Paul (Paul Boocock).

King Paul just returned from a voyage abroad to find that a “foreigner,” Dionysus, has been leading revels with women in the mountains. Paul imprisons the cult leader, but soon falls under his charismatic sway; Dionysus convinces Paul to put on a dress and join the party. In other versions of the tragedy, this scene is sometimes played as a homoerotic seduction or as a heated battle between uptight repression and decadent passion. But in the hands of these resourceful thespians, it is coldly and slowly hypnotic. Rand, an intense performer reminiscent of a young Eric Bogosian, carefully intones the same few lines over and over, while Boocock gradually falls under his spell. The Maxwellian mix of stilted language and colloquial hipster speech lightens the otherworldly mood: “Do you hanker to see the woman-on-woman action?”

While some segments seem too slapdash and linger a bit long (like Rinne Groff’s tragic denouement), this weird show usually hits the right notes. And as for why ERS engages in highly choreographed butt gyrations — well, it’s all Greek to me.