The Under the Radar festival is a much-needed showcase for adventurous theater companies whose work isn’t exactly commercial — for better or worse. Two recent cases: the New York troupe the Builders Association and Italy’s Motus company.
From the former comes Moe Angelos’ one-person show “Sontag: Reborn,” adapted from Susan Sontag’s journals. As visually stunning as it is illuminating, its only problem is that it’s bound to make you feel intellectually inferior.
How could it not? Superbly directed by Marianne Weems, it’s largely made up of lists of the books the late writer devoured early on by Gide, Dante, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky and other greats — that is, when she wasn’t absorbing Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night” and other cinema classics.
Childhood, she wrote at age 15, can be “a terrible waste of time.”
Angelos plays the writer as both a young woman and, as seen in a video that looms over her, the more familiar older figure with her trademark shock of white hair. Her portrayal embodies both Sontag’s youthful energy — “I want to sleep with many people” — and her later cynicism (“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor”).
Her body language is exquisite. Quoting a nastily negative review of Sontag’s first novel, 1963’s “The Benefactor,” she climbs onto her desk and curls into a fetal position.
Accompanied by hypnotic visuals that enhance the witty text, “Sontag: Reborn” brings this fascinating figure to vivid life.
On the other hand, you can practically feel Italian theater company Motus checking off a list of experimental theater tropes in its new piece, “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy.”
Stylized, repetitive movement? Got it. Using a classical text to comment on current issues? Done. Elaborate video projections and sound effects? Yup.
By the time you’re invited onstage for the finale, it’s hard not to wonder, “Didn’t that go out with ‘Hair’?”
It helps that the four performers go through their paces with startling energy, as the piece — referencing Sophocles’ tragedy “Antigone” — explores a Greek cop’s fatal 2008 shooting of a teen, which resulted in massive protests throughout that country.
Then again, as one of the actors says ironically, “Not everything real can become art.” From its meta-theatricality — pointing out, say, the problems with body mikes — to the by-now-obligatory interactions between performers and theatergoers, the show feels too self-conscious to be stirring.
The company’s passion and social consciousness is obvious. But so was that of the Occupy Wall Street protesters — and that was better theater.
*** SONTAG: REBORN.
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., 212-967-7555. Through Sunday.
** ALEXIS. A GREEK TRAGEDY.
La MaMa, 66 E. Fourth St., 212-475-7710. Through Saturday.