Theatre in Review: Leo (Theatre Row)Recently, it's begun to seem as if the theatre is undergoing a video takeover. Only a few seasons ago, the use of any projected imagery seemed like an expensive add-on, to be used only when strictly necessary. But the march of technology has been so relentless that we're now seeing shows (such as All New People or By the Way, Meet Vera Stark) that simply couldn't be done without the aid of a projector or two. (There's at least one theatre company, 3-Legged Dog, which is devoted to exploring video and its implications for the theatre.) Now comes Leo, in which video is the raison d'être of the entertainment, the punch line to the joke. The stage of the Clurman Theatre is divided into two. At stage left is a room turned on its side; the "floor" is, in fact, the stage left wall, and a "hanging" lightbulb sticks out of the stage right wall. Opposite this is a large vertical video screen; on it is projected the room next door, reoriented so the floor is on the bottom. The sole cast member is Tobias Wegner, the preternaturally limber young artist who spends the next 60 minutes putting his body through an unspeakable number of stress tests. As stage pictures go, it's an almost perfect metaphor for where we are in the theatre today -- three-dimensional live theatre, co-existing, in an increasingly interdependent way, with projection technology. The joke in Leo is as simple as its execution is not: it's all in how you look at it. When Wegner extends himself horizontally, propped up only by one extended arm, he appears on screen to be standing up, leaning against the wall. When he lies down and crosses his legs, his video image floats in mid-air, in the standard yoga position. As he crawls across deck, he is, on screen, being literally driven up the wall. If nothing else, Leo is an amusing and revealing exercise in how images lie. You watch the stage as if attending a tennis match, constantly looking from right to left and back again to see how many different ways your brain can be hoodwinked into seeing the impossible. At about the midway point, Wegner, chalk in hand, ups the ante, drawing in the details of a room: a table, a chair, a radio, and a goldfish bowl. These are transformed on screen using animation -- suddenly the fish acquires some color and begins to swim. Topping it off, an animated flood of water fills the room, turning Wegner into the star of his very own underwater ballet. It's a fiendishly clever idea and, if execution were all, Leo would rate an easy A+. But, even with its short running time, Wegner and his co-creators -- including Daniel Brière, the director, and Gregg Parks, the creative producer -- don't seem quite to know how to make an evening of it. The action starts slowly, which, in retrospect, may be a good idea, but it somehow doesn't build correctly. The gags don't top each other, and the action hasn't been arranged to create a throughline - or, at least, the semblance of one. Worse, there's a fair amount of dead air between the laughs. As a result, Leo comes off more as an ingenious gimmick in search of a show rather than a full-fledged entertainment. This is not to discount the astonishing work of Wegner, who will, apparently, try anything for an effect; his concentration and physical skill are remarkable. He is also brilliantly supported by Flavia Hevia's scenic and lighting design, a hauntingly empty space lit with a number of single-source ideas. It also goes without saying that Heiko Kalmbach's video and Ingo Panke's animations are thoroughly accomplished. But Leo never fully escapes a certain stop-and-start quality that leaves one on the outside, admiring the skill involved without really being caught up in it. The people behind Leo have come up with an entirely fresh way of using video in the theatre; whether they have anything to say with their technique is subject to debate.--David Barbour 
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