Theater: Feast For The Eye

Martha Clarke is the hottest figure in New York City's avant-garde theater, bringing an erstwhile dancer's feel for movement and a gift for making startlingly beautiful stage pictures to The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), based on Hieronymus Bosch's painting, and Vienna: Lusthaus (1986), which suggested the way 19th century romanticism evolved toward 20th century Holocaust. Clarke's allusive, dreamlike style can mesmerize audiences into believing they perceive subtle new connections among ideas and events. But in The Hunger Artist, which opened off-Broadway last week, Clarke has turned toward narrative and dialogue, and what meets the ear and brain is less than what meets the eye. The passages she has culled from Kafka, particularly The Metamorphosis, are familiar; the actors sometimes find eerie pathos but often waver between lobotomized declamation and coarse accent comedy. And there is unattractive self-pity in the vision of an artist as a caged carnival act. Still, there are magic tricks, bursts of flame, ritual burials in a stage full of soil and stark tableaux echoing, or worthy of, Dali and Magritte. The words fade quickly. The images linger. W.A.H. III