After two seasons as an ad hoc exhibition hall, the Anchorage’s neomedieval atmosphere, created by its 55-foot-high arched ceilings and dank air, was put to effective use by a site-specific performance, The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, sponsored by Creative Time, Inc. This mixed-media theatrical collage, written and directed by Matthew Maguire, of the Creation Production Company, a collaborative performance group with a special interest in theater and architecture, had a past as checkered as the Anchorage’s (originally intended as a warehouse for gold, it was used to store tires for city vehicles as late as 1983). Conceived for the singular Anchorage space, it was first presented on the conventional stages at New York’s LaMama Experimental Theater Club and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where it played like a 16th-century court masque–cum–lecture demonstration—intellectually interesting but dramatically stiff. In the eerie surroundings of the Anchorage, and with a novel structure—successive scenes were played throughout its seven vaults, with the audience following the action from room to room—The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo came to vivid theatrical life as a deconstructed mystery play, with a physically persuasive subtext of dusty walls and rough pathways, waterfalls and pools of water, echoing sounds and dim lighting to counterpoint its brain-teasing text.

The play’s subject is taken from the ideas of Camillo, a 16th-century philosopher/mystic who built an actual memory theater for France’s François I, an architectural model of the mind which he claimed would convey all the learning of the past to its viewers. Like the eponymous hero of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Funes the Memorious (1944), whose extremely logical plan to reduce all his experience to some 70,000 abstracted recollections became a vertiginous nightmare, Maguire’s Camillo pushes his “scientific” demonstrations of memory beyond rational thought into an area of dreamlike visions. A commedia troupe reenacts a recurring memory: “I saw one of them, Columbina, strike Arlequino with a mallet.” The King (Nadja Smith) appears, and reappears, offering money Assistants act out the purported workings of memory in absurdly literal ways—for example, climbing a rope to indicate ”memory rising." Throughout it all, Camillo (Christopher McCann) is haunted by a Beast. Is it his violent other self (he may have committed a murder, he can’t remember), the irrational, or a demon of amnesia? Whatever this creature is, Camillo is finally exhausted by repeated struggles with it, and, subdued, as if after a wracking seizure, he quietly ends the demonstration.

There’s a lot of heavy mental freight carried in this arcane alchemylike matter. and even more in Maguire’s explicit intentions to link the convoluted theorizing to ideas about America’s current “moral amnesia”; for instance, Reagan’s odd justification for visiting the SS cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany—“I feel very strongly about not reawakening the memories of the past”—is interpolated into the play’s text. What is finally convincing about The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, though, is less an intellectual understanding of its oblique concepts than a strong, visceral sense of its workings. The goings-on in between and around the edges of scenes (figures scuttling from one room to the next, characters throwing mud-balls against walls), the stunning set installations (Kristin Jones’ and Andrew Ginzel’s curtain of falling water, Laurie Hawkinson’s giant camera obscura), the compelling synthesizer drones of composer Vito Ricci’s evocative score (played live, from a hot-dog vendor’s cart pushed from vault to vault), the lush, Lucino Visconti-esque costumes—all conveyed the essential drift of Camillo’s argument in a sensory way The play’s almost hallucinatory vignettes sneaked past whole categories of intellectual analysis to provoke a state of dreamlike associations. Only a feeling of being moved around a bit too often and an ending that was more whimper than bang prevented this memory theater from being totally memorable.

—John Howell