Unique ‘Autobahn’ feels like eavesdropping

The most exciting thing about Las Vegas Little Theatre's "Autobahn" -- one of nine productions featured in the fifth annual Samuel Beckett Festival -- is that it expands your idea of what theater can be.

When you enter the huge warehouse performing space, you're greeted by the site of five real cars, each populated with two people in the front seats. We're invited to sit in chairs by the car of our choice, or to climb into the back seats.

Each car is the setting for a one-act drama. All five (two from the script have been dropped) play concurrently, and we rotate our way around until we've seen the complete cycle.

It's surprising how effective organizing director TJ Larsen's approach is. If you know author Neil LaBute's work, you know that he often deals with human cruelty, and that the conversations we're about to hear are likely to start out as mindless chit-chat and deepen with revelations of some kind of horror.

By our being close to the car's occupants, we're made to feel as if we're eavesdropping on a couple's most intimate moments. I can't imagine this kind of gut-wrenching effect being achieved by this interesting but overwrought script in a "regular" setting.

Although we can hear snippets of dialogue from the plays we're not watching, we're still able to focus on the drama at hand. Somehow, Larsen has been able to time the action so that all the vignettes end at the same time. And the approach brings out the best in these actors. I suspect having the audience so close encouraged them to keep their emoting at a realistic level.

Fine performances abound. Among them: Mark Brunton as a bullying husband who seems to think a simple apology solves all problems; Rick Ginn, as a volatile, middle-aged hot head who has a strange relationship with a young girl; and Mike Wood who, without a single line of dialogue, communicates the anguish of a husband who has brought a lot of suffering to his wife.

Four directors engineered the five plays, yet the evening has a unity of vision. Brunton, in particular, gets some quiet, poignant effects as a director in his short about a babbling wife (Ela Rose) who is trying hard to delude herself into explaining away her husband's criminal behavior.

The show is a joyful reminder that drama comes in all shapes and sizes.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.