Wilma Theater presents Blanka Zizka's world premiere 'Adapt!'

Teenager Lenka (Czech actress Aneta Kernova) stands outside an imposing wall topped with barbed wire (set by Matt Saunders), and immediately plunges into a surreal adventure that looks both backward to Lenka’s family's grim existence and forward to life in New York City.

Pork chops

Lenka's primary concern, finding food in a German refugee camp, soon subsides when an old woman joins her (Aneza Papadopoulou) and leads her to examine her situation. Men in suits with pig masks, chanting "four legs good, two legs better" (a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm) roll through in plush office chairs, moving in formation like menacing birds, antagonizing the pair. Madonna's song "Material Girl" inspires an exuberant dance and pop-culture collage (projections by Christopher Ash) about the Western world's wonders.

Zizka's exuberantly inventive staging, invigorated by Daniel Perelstein's sound, Mariana Sadovska's compositions, and Silvana Cardell's choreography, always fascinates, even when its intentions are unclear. However, Zizka’s production (she also directs) races past her script. Why do long-haired fairytale goblins move furniture? Who knows?

The second act takes Lenka back to her family, sometimes as a ghostly witness to her parents (Sarah Gliko and Keith J. Conallen) discussing her defection, but also arguing about her intentions with her sister (Campbell Meaghan O'Hare) before leaving. The nonlinear style provides little insight; at times, she seems like Scrooge examining his past, present, and possible future in A Christmas Carol, but without Dickens's moral or narrative clarity.

Coming to America

Lenka finally arrives in America, where a cowboy actor and a hot-dog vendor introduce her to American values and the freedom she seeks. The old woman urges Lenka to hold onto her past, but when someone asks Lenka where she's from, she says, "It doesn't matter. I'm an American now."

Does it matter? Adapt! seems to say that freedom of expression trumps everything; it's a stirring, albeit simplistic, message. What Lenka wants to express, or even how, isn't clear, though she mentions wanting to join theater radicals Judith Malina and Julian Beck's Living Theatre. Therein lies the play's fatal weakness: Lenka remains an empty vessel, bobbing on history's waves without intention or definition. Her friend Marek (Jered McLenigan), a songwriter repressed by the government and based on a real person, seems much more interesting and active, but barely appears.

The abstract, dreamy world of Adapt! achieves successful realization in spectacular Wilma fashion, but its purpose proves elusive.