Theater review: '800 Words' cast over the moon

The world inside the head of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a mystical and often mystifying place, filled with surreal landscapes, philosophic rants and psychedelic revelations. Playwright Victoria Stewart cracks that world wide open and invites audiences to explore its convoluted nooks and crannies in "800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick," currently being performed at the Playwrights' Center.

Dick was a prolific writer whose work is probably most widely known from the films that were adapted from his novels, including "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall." Stewart's play explores the last years of Dick's life, compressing and looping time and space as figures from his past appear and disappear in no particular chronological order. In a beautifully conceived visual counterpoint, director and designer Jeremy Wilhelm's revolving set mirrors Stewart's conception of Dick's unfurling mind.

Stewart juggles some heady material here, including Dick's belief that he had received visions from God and was living a parallel life as a first-century Christian apostle, but it's leavened with enough wit and stagecraft to keep it accessible even for audiences that aren't hard-core Dick fans.

A stellar cast doesn't hurt either. Luverne Seifert fills the stage to bursting in an earthy, yet transcendent performance as the writer, veering seamlessly from apocalyptic visions to sly satisfaction that he can pass off cheap brandy as Rémy Martin. Seifert's uncanny ability to embody both the grandiose and the pedestrian elements of his character lends humanity and charm to the role.

Maggie Chestovich is equally successful playing a variety of unlikely muses, including Dick's long-dead twin sister, who leans over his shoulder and mutely encourages him as he writes, and a young drug dealer who needs to collect her money and get home in time for her curfew.

Mo Perry, playing the last of Dick's five wives, offers up a nicely honed stoicism, while Ryan Parker Knox adds a tongue-in-cheek edge to Dick's paranoia, as a stylized "Secret Agent Man."

Stewart illuminates Dick's life through a variety of sources, including conversations with his agent (played by Clarence Wethern) that reveal his ambiguous desire to be acknowledged as a mainstream writer, and philosophic dialogues with his cat, a puppet manipulated and voiced by Kimberly Richardson.

At one point in "800 Words" Dick confesses: "I'm a science fiction writer, my sense of reality might be a little skewed." Stewart's play revels in the vision that this skewed sense of reality conjures.

Lisa Brock writes regularly about theater.