Review: A Spanish Stage Provocateur Makes a Blood-Dripping Debut

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — The local debut of Spanish theater-maker Angélica Liddell has been a long time coming. She created her company, Atra Bilis Teatro, in 1993 and went on to become a darling of the most prestigious European stages with often transgressive, hair-raising shows in which she pushed her body to its physical and, possibly, mental limits.

Now Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series is finally introducing Liddell to New York audiences with “Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne (This Brief Tragedy of the Flesh),” which opened Thursday at the Alexander Kasser Theater. It is a shock to the system — especially since we haven’t had 25 years to get used to her modus operandi. (Liddell’s first and, until now, last United States appearance was in Seattle, in 2011.)

To be absolutely clear, this is not for everybody. But if you surrender to the work’s cryptic terms, it is transfixing.

The 60-minute show’s title is inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem “Of All the Souls That Stand Create.”

But the evening is more austere ritual than anything resembling a text-based play. Don’t expect the life and times of the recluse of Massachusetts, either — though we do get bees, a regular feature in Dickinson’s writing, encased in an observation hive with a microphone so we can hear the poet’s “buccaneers of buzz.”

Fans of avant-garde Italian director Romeo Castellucci will be in familiar territory here. The piece unfurls as a succession of visually astonishing tableaus; you could freeze-frame any second of the show and have a picture-perfect composition. A figure in a white hood and red mask shoots arrows. Actors parade in long black or white aprons and Puritan-style hats, their faces hidden by veils. Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, is there, as are two women in red dresses evocative of Dickinson’s time.

Sometimes there is pin-drop silence; sometimes there is Bach; and sometimes there is a punishingly loud electronic drone. (Felix Magalhaes did the sound.)

In recent years, Liddell has pulled back from the extreme physical abuse she would inflict on herself onstage. Her body-centered work, which often involved bloodletting, is somewhere on a continuum that would also include the Viennese actionists, Marina Abramovic and American performance artist Ron Athey. Perhaps Liddell would be better known in the United States, if, like Abramovic, she were on the art, rather than the theatrical, circuit.

Here she reveals all in a gesture that, paradoxically, feels opaque. Lifting her camisole in an early scene, she slides, spread-eagled and facing the audience, onto a dildo on a chair. (This is not all that new, as those who saw Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud’s “Pâquerette” can attest.) Then a bloodlike substance dribbles from her mouth. Watching this felt oddly clinical.

You may accuse Liddell of mere provocation or ersatz theater of cruelty, but “Esta Breve Tragedia” has a thoughtful, pained grandeur and a matter-of-fact generosity in which body and mind are accepted in all their variations. (Some of the cast members have Down syndrome; others are missing limbs.) Liddell ends the show in a glass box full of live butterflies. On Thursday, she had a serene smile.

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“Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne (This Brief Tragedy of the Flesh)”

Through Sunday at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, N.J.; peakperfs.org. Running time: 1 hour.