Nightmare on 18th Street

Watching a play is not like critiquing it; sitting in the audience with a pen and questioning every scene is not the same as letting the action wash over you. It kills the experience of a play to wonder, "Why does the pretty actress lying flat as a board next to the kitchen table have a wooden spoon in her mouth?" or "Why is the half-naked mute circling the man with a bag on his head three times counterclockwise?" Or at least it kills the experience if the play's no good. If it is good, with a disarming cast and an original script, like the first half of Adam Rapp's Dreams of the Salthorse, all a critic can do is sit still and stop trying to make so much sense.

Salthorse is a dream play. It's easy to fake dream plays, using weird imagery as an excuse for cheap symbolism, but the bizarre things that happen in Salthorse are deeply, unfathomably bizarre -- they start as evocative nonsense and stay that way. Adam Rapp made his Bay Area debut last year at the Berkeley Rep with Nocturne, a brooding monologue by a young novelist who killed his sister accidentally when he was a boy. Salthorse explores an even grimmer, lonelier landscape, where the wind howls through the slats of a whorehouse and black-hatted bandits hack off people's heads.

It begins with a long, pretentious speech by the Headless Man. He's rumpled and out of breath, and holds a briefcase in front of his shirttails. His neck seems to have been severed and stitched back on. He mentions "the smell of blood, like the smell of menstruating -- a woman's thickness bleeding out of me," then moves the briefcase, and sure enough his shirttails are drenched in blood. Wind moans; there's the sound of galloping hooves. This scene doesn't work because the horror is sudden and glib: We haven't even met the Headless Man, and he's already giving us puzzles about his past and shocking us with gore. Rick Eldredge plays him with a feverish intensity but no substance.

The scene shifts to the kitchen of a darkened, drafty farmhouse. A fiftyish woman slumps at the table and stares at a flickering TV. The screen blinks out, and the woman hollers down the basement stairs at a man called "Mister" for not working hard enough on the "Dynamo Bike." (Electricity around here flows from an Exercycle.) Mister is a bare-chested young primitive in a pair of paper shorts. He seems to have no vocal cords. The aging woman, Tree, is an alcoholic Texas madam who once had a husband and son in the house; the farm became a brothel after they disappeared. She abuses Mister for not keeping the fridge stocked with "double brew," and settles for a soft drink. "Fuckin' Fife Cola," she complains. "Tastes like crow piss." Her misery lightens only when the storm outside delivers a naked young woman, later called Starla, who also has no voice but should earn good money around the brothel.

Tree's lines are sharp and bare as barbed wire, and Kimberly Richards delivers them in a delightfully nasty way. Melanie Rademaker is beautifully fervid and nervous as Starla, creeping around the farmhouse while she tries to make sense of Tree. Matt Roe is a wretched, funny Mister, and Vanessa Aspillaga does well as a half-Mexican prostitute named Bounce, who eventually falls in love with the Headless Man. Without the humor and conviction they bring to their roles, Salthorse would collapse -- the strangeness of it would lose the audience if the actors didn't behave as if everything were normal, even when the Headless Man comes in wearing a burlap bag.

"The character of the Headless Man," according to a note by the playwright, "is damned in a nightmarish circuit of ... lovelorn homes in the salt-blighted world somewhere around the Texas-Mexico border where the act of love is punishable by decapitation." The people who enforce this rule are the Blackhats, a band of three cowboys who also sing rounds of lullabies and folk songs. One of them is Tree's lost husband. They invade the house and playfully terrorize everyone in it. We learn that the Headless Man is Tree's (formerly dead) son Johnny, and in the second act we see Tree as she once was: a cheerful, chivying mother in a clean blue farm wife's dress.

Salthorse stumbles, in the end, because what should be an emotional climax is nothing but a scene from a horror film. The Headless Man isn't human enough, and the excess of dark, surreal material starts to cloy. Still, dream-logic is hard to keep warm onstage, and this Encore production -- firmly directed by Sturgis Warner, with a nice, decrepit set by James Faerron -- moves eloquently enough to keep even a critic dazzled and confused.