Theater review: 'Four Seasons' is opera of the senses

The world is so used to artists craving recognition that audiences might initially be nonplussed by those who fight you off with a stick and then run.

So it is in Romeo Castellucci's eagerly anticipated theater piece The Four Seasons Restaurant, presented by the Fringe Festival. Its flourishes are so grand that the production is opera of the senses that pulls you closer while pushing you away, with parallel plots about artists in retreat from the world.

The presentation is dazzlingly inventive yet with such confrontational content - even more than like-minded artists such as Pina Bausch - that the work of this acclaimed, cutting-edge Italian theater director should come with disclaimers warning away those with high blood pressure or untreated mental illness.

The reward at Thursday's opening in the 23rd Street Armory (a packed house, though with early departures) is a glimpse of realms as uncharted as black holes, enabled by states of mind in which spurning typical acts of communication opens doors to - elsewhere. You're left altered, maybe permanently.

The starting point is Mark Rothko's late-1950s murals created for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York - blazing red artistic infernos that seem to touch the underlying elemental forces of existence but were withdrawn by the artist from a setting that would trivialize them. Rothko is never mentioned or seen, but his heat has a counterpart in deep-frequency sounds said to be recorded from a black hole, turned up loud in this production for maximum tactile impact.

Ten Amish-looking maidens arrive with stylized balletic grace. They appear to sever one another's tongues but still face the task of reciting (with some prerecorded voices) an 18th-century play by Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, about a philosopher who retreats from his public by throwing himself into Mount Etna.

Theatrical elements that might illuminate the play - plot, character exposition, and staging - are nearly absent. Instead, you're somewhat adrift in a sea of gorgeous language. The women help one another strip off their clothes in a moment of liberation when each walks, with graceful deliberation, into the hereafter.

That's when The Four Seasons Restaurant becomes truly interesting: More black-hole sounds, curtains moving forward and backward, a visual depiction of the sonic inferno are concluded with the final scene of the Wagner opera Tristan und Isolde about the relationship between love and death. No spoiler meant; this is only one interpretation. All others will be different.