OnStage: Between the lines

A distracted woman looks for a party. A man boasts about shoplifting his own birthday present. A disillusioned couple fight while a frantic writer tries to piece together fragments of memories. A solitary figure watches all. Something sinister binds these people who live in close proximity. Some know more about it than others. Only one knows the truth.

This sounds like the makings of a mystery story, but Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater's (SPDT) "Rooms of Disquiet" is not your typical whodunit.

First performed in 2005, revisited this past summer during a residency at the Tofte Lake Center in the Boundary Waters and now remounted for three performances at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, "Rooms" draws on Pimsler's fascination with film director Alfred Hitchcock and writer Franz Kafka. Each artist expertly exposed the moral ambiguities within human nature, and Pimsler applied their influence to create a movement-based theatrical work in which secrets are the only common bond for a restless cast of characters.

The choreographer/director's process began with Hitchcock's classic "Rear Window," specifically the idea of watching an intimate -- and possibly forbidden -- event unfold from a distance.

From movie to movement

"I wanted to see how I could transfer cinematic technique into performance work, how to extend a moment, how to invite audiences to look at things in a more close-up way," said Pimsler from New York.

But as in "Rear Window," Pimsler continued, "there is a sort of obstruction, so you're getting at something, but it's never fully realized until all the parts accumulate." Specific lighting choices, sets that roughly suggest time and place, partial viewpoints, shifting and overlapping interactions -- all conspire to permit different interpretations.

Pimsler generated the script for "Rooms" by "sampling" certain words from Kafka's short, short stories (some only two or three lines long) and then recycling them throughout the work, allowing their meanings to change depending on which character delivers the lines.

"I just wanted to hang on to Kafka's language in this very stylized poetic form, rather than have it be more prosaic," he said.

The result is one of SPDT's most text-driven works, but still, Pimsler said, dance remains a central communicative force within the performance. "When there's an interaction between a man and a woman and the man puts his hand on the woman's hip, nothing needs to be said because the movement is saying exactly what I want it say."

Suzanne Costello, artistic co-director of SPDT, who appears in "Rooms" as an ethereal presence in a party dress, compared the script's streamlined style to that of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter.

"It's pared down to what needs to be said," she said recently. "There's no expounding, and pauses have incredible importance." Deliberate breaks in the action contrast with emotional and physical outbursts.

Costello also acknowledged that there are a lot of doubts raised by the work's ominous goings-on: "Who's the most dangerous character? Who's the most victimized? Who's providing the alibi? There's this underlying mystery, and it happened in moonlight with men running up a hill."

Maybe we won't be able to answer all, or even one, of these questions after watching "Rooms of Disquiet." Maybe we'll leave the theater a bit disturbed by the clash of disheveled humanity. If so, then somewhere Hitchcock and Kafka are smiling.

Caroline Palmer is a Minneapolis writer.