Terminal Hip: On the Brink of Coherence

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Terminal Hip: On the Brink of Coherence

The Hideout, through April 8

Running Time: 1 hr, 5 min

Within a set that is part Tron video game and part psychedelic classroom, the unstoppable Dan Dietz pulls off a feat of incomprehension. It is hard to imagine a better, more stimulating version of the Mac Wellman script than this Salvage Vanguard Theater production, created by Dietz and director Jason Neulander -- hard because Wellman's is a script that is gibberish. Literally. One sample line: "Any damn fool can winterize the octagon." Linguistic chaos is the plot. Or maybe it's something about the X and the Y, which Dietz keeps writing meaningfully on the blackboard. "Meaningfully" is the word too, because Dietz uses a change-up emphasis technique that turns this Mad Libs genre piece into a one-man lecture ever-teetering on the brink of coherence.

Delivering the lines, which reportedly came with no stage directions or hint of intent, Dietz alternates among personae like pseudoscientist, sports announcer, film-noir star, politician, professor of rhetoric, and revival preacher in his successful effort to make the potentially exhausting Wellman script come to life with a growl and a whisper. Looking like some maniacal cross between Quentin Tarantino and the trickster god Loki, Dietz commands the stage while both sitting silent and hopping up and down, which he does both in and out of his chair, hollering clearly, but with indistinct intention, rallying cries such as "Pick-Up Sticks!" and murmuring sinister commentary like "Lice lurks in Seventh Heaven."

When Dietz follows a hyper rendition of Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First" schtick with the line "I don't even know what I'm talking about," you almost don't believe him, so complete does his world appear. Wittgenstein said, "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life," and this particular language game leads one to imagine something like: Dietz is terrific to see in action, and as directed by Neulander, Dietz manages to create a stream-of-unconsciousness babble-scape that is viscerally pleasing and nice and short, too. "Thousands of important Santas" can't be wrong.