THEATER: "Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore."

Photos/Steven Schreiber

Company XIV's latest, a so-called "meditation" on the desultory women in Charles Bukowski's life, is a carefully culled selection of the poet's work, each piece selected and subsequently edited into visually appealing chunks by Austin McCormick, the group's choreographer/director. Unlike previous work, however, which pulled a decidedly adult view (and physical) view of the stories of the Trojan War, Adam and Eve, and The Nutcracker, Love. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. is a flightier work (as the four-part title suggests).

The end result is successfully stark and bleak: designer Zane Pihlstrom leaves the garage-like theater open, save for a cluttered "apartment" that we see through shutters and video feeds, and Gina Scherr's lighting is dusky, or fed up in dire earthy tones from the LED-boxed ground. That is, unfortunately, all that comes through: a dark, ravaging, and hard-to-follow screed in which Laura Careless dances atop a dirt-covered and rain-soaked piano lid (severed from its body), climbs the walls (so as to better scrawl curses on them), and writhes around in lingerie, all while a somber and wife-beater-wearing Jeff Takacs stalks the periphery, rasping Bukowski's words. Though McCormick comes up with a staggering number of ways to show these rough-and-tumble women, there's a one-note feel to them, to the point where the music, the words, and the dancing bleed together (retitled: "Lovusingbore").

That single note, however, is still a doozy -- or as Bukowski might put it, "All rump and breast and dizziness," and if the work seems stupid, it is "stupid with life," for whether you like it or not, Careless dances (and stomps, and spins, and rolls, and crosses, and grunts) the work to within an inch of that "stupid life." When the poet describes a drunken woman who trips in the street and slows traffic as a green antelope, it is McCormick who takes the image to task, using a fan to blow green smoke through the theater, and it is Careless who teeters in those "tower stilts" of her heels, to the point where she is often forced to walk on the sides of her shoes. She dances, at first, as a projection of the text (it lights her up, the words filling the floor and walls), and by the end of the play, she dances atop the writer, Takacs giving us a clear image of an author debased and lost in his own work, his haunting lyric women.

As a whole, Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. seems incomplete, or at least less multifaceted than it was intended to be: despite being literal poetry in motion, the words seem entirely beside the point. But in specific moments and with special effects, Company XIV continues to prod the imagination. Though you may not fully understand their latest, you cannot help but feel it.