“Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, 12/17/09

www.pipermckenzie.com

True to the action ethos of its kung-fu title, you’re dropped right in the middle of a staged fight and a laugh riot, its wordless cast projecting a polyglot of stage-hypnotist zoo-mime, Keystone Cop drills, interpretive jazzhands, Shaolin playbook and Vedic sex manual. But let’s back this up and tell the players apart:

After gathering several years of evidence on writer-director Jeff Lewonczyk’s unerring inappropriateness and actor-director Hope Cartelli’s method-seizures, when the two took joint credit for “Craven Monkey”’s concept I parked in the front row and girded my lap for an oversloshing keg of crazy. But the clashing elements of their creativity seem to moderate each other (and what better definition of marriage can I come up with?), achieving an equilibrium that eludes most of the characters in this Darwinian fable.

A dawn-of-time quest myth from before the continents drifted apart and any of the world’s folkloric traditions got unmashed, “Craven” concerns the first hominid to be ostracized from the tribe, thus entering the necessary ordeal to ascend to singular humanity.

Existing on the fringes of acceptable culture and having explored the pre-Biblical disaster story of the king of gods calling down a global flood to silence the racket of human rutting in 2008’s “Babylon Babylon, scriptwriter Lewonczyk has a keen sense of history pivoting on the primal faux pas, and the titular Craven Monkey’s transgression entails offending the tribe’s sense of tradition by doing it biped-style. A dirty joke slips into poetry, as Craven Monkey and Lady Monkey become “the first to look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected.”

Nonetheless, Craven is ejected onto a Scapegoat’s Journey that at first mainly involves a plan to scale the tallest nearby mountain and drop its teetering boulder on his hated hometown. But a more meaningful ascension becomes his destiny, shoved along by two prehistoric parent figures in a kind of archaeological out-of-town tryout of the God, Lucifer and Job story.

Cartelli (”The Vital Spirit”) is a bioengineer earth mother fashioning a worldwide menagerie of children species, setting boundaries of extinction when they don’t know what’s good for them and holding a few limited-edition behemoths in reserve to send natural-order transgressors like Craven Monkey to a permanent time-out — leave it to this show’s brain-trust to give evolution a creation myth and come up with a scientific rationale for mythic monsters (though the pre-Abrahamic pantheons Lewonczyk and Cartelli draw on did nature’s work with a much more modern grasp of basic biology than the guys who took over from them). Art Wallace (”The Sensei”) is a celestial game-warden the Spirit conjured in her image to manage creation but who becomes a Prometheus-like troublemaker, coaching Craven Monkey to walk upright, use weapons, and defy the goddess.

Left behind with the tribe who won’t try anything once, Lady Monkey runs away to rejoin her lover and they become an earthy Adam and Eve struggling to escape the garden, with the Spirit and Sensei two poles of commanding common sense and nurturing aspiration that no one can think are either fully right or wrong.

But remember, when it comes to most of the dramatis personae, they ain’t heavy — they’re monkeys! The only member of the company who gets to speak let alone lecture is Lewonczyk as the offstage narrator, delivering the profane text in deadpan nature-documentary locutions that disclaim weightiness while the nonverbal cast stomps home a timeless semaphore of love, striving, and projectile poop.

Cartelli mimes an imperious, reality-weaving dance of destruction and creation decked in a good-fairy armor that calls to mind some holiday department-store window diorama of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”; Wallace radiates all-fatherly warmth with serene arm-sweeps and a shaggy conical cloak that suggests a cross between a walking fir-tree and Silent Bob.

Adrian Jevicki and Jessi Gotta as the two lead Monkeys and the ensemble of Becky Byers, Fred Backus, Mateo Moreno and Melissa Roth as the tribe and various monsters are a whirlwind of learned frenzy, igniting the stage to a story told mostly in fight-choreographers Qui Nguyen and Adam Swiderski’s Jack Kirbyesque ballets of brutality.

That team, best known for the Vampire Cowboys troupe’s stage-combat-centered high kitsch, stretches some unaccustomed but expert muscles of delicate harmony as well as acrobatic carnage here. Craven and Lady’s most crucial heroism comes as lovers, not fighters, when a blockbuster cataclysm leaves them alone and obliged to get down to the business of repopulating the earth, this time with the new human species. We all know how that worked out, but the play ends before the, erm, honeymoon is over.

This is all part of the self-explanatory Fight Fest, a season of sports entertainment to mirror our coast-to-coast shouting match and international pastime of perpetual battle. But in the elegant interplay and affirmative physicality of “Craven Monkey”’s considered slapstick is a vision of passionate impulse bestowed with purpose, and essential conflict tamed as art.