Knock! The Daniil Kharms Project

"Daniil Kharms" was the pen name (along with a plethora of other pseudonyms) for the Russian author Daniil Iv�novich Yuvatchov, who achieved notable success of this children's literature, as well as his experiments with non-linear and non-rational storytelling. (He's now thought of as an early figure in the avant-garde tradition.)

Kharms' stylistic explorations also got him in trouble with the authorities, who exiled him to Kursk in 1931. The exile was brief, and Kharms returned to his writings, but time took its toll and he was almost forgotten -- except for his children's work, which led latter-day scholars back to the plays, stories, and poetry he wrote for more mature audiences. Luckily, a trove of his writings was kept safe during the travails of World War II by a friend who rescued a number of manuscripts and kept them safe in a suitcase.

Hence the recurring images, in the imaginary beasts production of "Knock! The Daniil Kharms Project", of a valise subjected to competing attentions, its contents -- a sheaf of papers -- spilled and gathered, and the valise itself hauled through a snowstorm. Talk about meta! Using translations prepared by Irina Yakubovskaya, imaginary beasts, under the leadership of dramaturg Matthew McMahan, strings together, and shapes into a busily coruscating whole, a collection of Kharms' works.

The feel ranges from Vaudevillian to clownish. Pratfalls are commonplace here, as are gruesome twists right out of scary old-school fairy tales: In one instance, a man is surrounded by a coven of cackling crones and hurled into a cook pot which sits on a roaring fire. It's all implied, of course; the cook pot is an overturned table, and the fire exists only as a crackling whoosh courtesy of sound designer Chris Larson, who finds occasion for auditory effects that are by turns cartoonish, zany, or grimly authentic. Still, it's enough: You get the idea, and the troupe's energetic physicality underlines and gives substance to the imaginings. In conversation with a colleague after the play, I heard concerns expressed about what sort of impact these frightening passages would have on children.

That's a fair enough question, though the traditional fairy tale hardly shied away from the crueler aspects of life. ("Der Struwwelpeter," anyone? -- That German storybook, beloved of generations of sprogs and nippers, notorious for its thumb-snippings and heedless little girls going up in flames as jabbering cats look on in horror? If Kharms knew of it, he must have been a fan, and I imagine that he and mordantly funny cartoonist Edward Gorey would have been a splendid pair for afternoon tea in haunted houses, arsenic biscuits and all.)

But these surrealistic, Gogol-infused, sometimes Kafkaesque nightmares speak most frighteningly to the adults in the room: Faceless (okay, headless), towering authority figures burst in on people from out of nowhere to round them up and take them away for engaging in sexual behavior, or else deliberately turn orderly queues into scenes of chaos and confusion before strong-arming rubes out of their money. Innocent citizens set out on mundane errands only to be repeatedly bashed over the head by falling bricks (losing more memory with each conk). Bellowing watchmen are foiled by cunning guttersnipes. Angels wrestle with human opponents in shadow plays that proceed, then recede, like dreams. All of this speaks to that unsettling enigma: Who is it that oppresses and terrorizes us, if not ourselves?

Narratively, there's not a straight line in sight: All is swerve and spiral, but patterns of institutional abuse of power quickly and clearly emerge. This is nightmare sprung of bureaucracy, ideology, and brute force gussied up with rhetoric. Of course it is: It's Russian. But it also speaks to us here, today, as an irrepressible answer to the timeless machinations of knuckle-brawling, double-talking power mongers of all stripes: Clerics, politicians, bullies. Kharms is seen in some quarters as a harbinger of the theater of the absurd; in any case, he seems to fit into a general tradition that includes not nay Gogol and Kafka, but also Joyce and Burroughs. Call it the Comedy of Defiance. It's got just about that much square-chinned, pugilistic wit and mocking bravado.

Kudos to the actors, who embrace the nonsense and fly with it: Joey Pelletier, Noah Simes, Sarah Gazdowicz, Michael Underhill, Michael Chodos, Managrazia Lafauci, Kaitee Tredway, Libby Schap, William Schuller, and Molly Kimmerling.

Cotton Talbot-Minkin's costumes deserve mention, too, looking suitably peasant-like and yet also as though they might have been pulled from the trunk of a traveling carnival. Christopher Bocchiaro and director Matthew Woods have cooked up an eerie set design full of doors, which the characters use to pop in and out of the untidy little pocket universe imaginary beasts conjures up.

"Knock! The Daniil Kharms Project" continues through
Oct., 18 at the Boston Center for the Arts. For tickets and more information, please visit http://www.imaginarybeasts.org/imaginary_beasts/Now_Playing.html