PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Open Gate’s Powerful ‘Seeds’

Serious stuff’s going on in Open Gate Theatre’s “Seeds.” The Friday program at Boyd Street Theater in downtown Los Angeles (to be repeated next weekend) included two new works that combine movement, sound, words and music in novel and powerful ways.

Will Salmon is a performer who would do Samuel Beckett proud. In his own “Scenes from Odysseus’ Return,” Salmon is a shuffling, blind beggar returning home. His heels dragging out of his shoes, a folded blanket draped around his shoulders, he expels a wheezy laugh. Later, he bends down to the floor, his crooked finger addressing the wreck of his shoe with the awful gravity of the insane. His voice croaks out a little song that sounds like a garbled psalm, then expands into a great impotent roar.

As Phemeus, a minstrel, Bill Roper combines lugubrious bleats of his tuba with easy, graceful moves. Roper’s throwaway rap on the minstrel business sometimes skates too softly over key words, but his genial delivery is slyly beguiling. Alex Cline’s impeccably shaped percussion effects subtly underline this piece as well as scenes from Betty Nash’s chameleonlike “The Awakenings.”

Wearing a man’s suit, Nash awakens as a stiff-legged Frankenstein, expelling breathy sounds and low groans as she moves her arms like a basketball guard, her eyes staring in frozen surprise.

Then she becomes a mumbling street person, singing snatches of a Spanish song in a wispy treble and briefly hectoring the audience. This shifts into a deliciously taut flamenco dance and a fanny-wriggling number that suddenly plunges into the plaintive, stumbling persona of a disoriented woman searching for her children.

The final scene, with Salmon’s simple shifts of weight and extended arms creating the rapacious “Eagle” Cortez, and Nash as a quivering but vengeful Mexican “Snake,” has extraordinary power.