Review: Geoff Sobelle’s ‘Object Lesson’: Welcome to a hoarder’s show-and-tell

When it comes to hoarding, the Collyer brothers have nothing on Geoff Sobelle, who has created a performance piece on the compulsion to preserve the flotsam and jetsam of the past.

To this end, the Kirk Douglas Theatre, where “The Object Lesson” can be seen through Oct. 4, has been transformed into the warehouse of one man’s life. Everywhere you look, there are cartons crammed with old junk — tangled telephone sets, a tarnished teakettle, assorted balls, unprepossessing paperbacks, even a collection of clothes found on the street.

On a back wall, a library card catalog houses drawers of miscellany. One contains streamers, another sticks. The labels range from the banal (“statements”) to the creepy (“tetanus” — for a fearsomely rusty object). Out-of-fashion ties have their resting place. And there’s a catch-all (“supplies”) that is conveniently repeated.

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Audience members are permitted to roam freely as they enter the space. The installation, designed by Steven Dufala, might be the most enthralling aspect of the show. “The Object Lesson” has its share of memorable moments, to be sure, but none as astonishing as that first glimpse of the way the Douglas, a venue that can come off as stiff and sterile, has been transfigured.

This immersive archival wonderland reveals what a haunted house really looks like. Christopher Kuhl’s lighting, artfully deploying an array of desk lamps, deepens the atmosphere of psychological mystery.

The production, directed by David Neumann, a choreographer with an extensive background in experimental theater, is divided into movements that try to capitalize on Sobelle’s versatility as a performer. An actor who trained in physical theater, Sobelle is also an illusionist, a deft clown and an eccentric dancer able to be graceful on ice skates while chopping a salad with his blades.

He begins in search of specific items, pulling a much-used tape recorder out of the horn of an antique phonograph. Sobelle uses objects to structure his performance, but his character is trying to find the self he left behind before becoming a shut-in entombed in stuff. (The title suggests both a seminar on our relationship to things and a cautionary tale about a pack rat who has slipped his social moorings.)

The elliptical monologue Sobelle speaks into the tape recorder by way of an introduction becomes part of a conversation he later has with himself. A variation of this clever routine is enacted with an audience participant, who finds herself on an unexpected date with a rather peculiar guy in a room full of amused spectators, most of whom are breathing a sigh of relief for not being chosen.

Sobelle scales the upper levels of his set to locate memory-stirring objects. His movements have a Chaplinesque grace, but there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. “The Object Lesson” has the rhythm of an impromptu show-and-tell, with Sobelle hemming and hawing from one section to the next, even though he’s no doubt following a script.

The lack of a narrative flow is a liability. There are pockets when nothing much seems to be happening but Sobelle aimlessly scurrying. Theatergoers, seated on boxes or standing in the gaps of clutter, shift around him like a parting sea.

He carries out a heavy traffic light, which holds for him special significance. After explaining why the item is personally important, he quietly has us watch the colors change from red to green to yellow at the same slow pace of a busy intersection. One can feel time passing, which is no doubt the point, but a risky one that tempted me to look at my watch.

Of course, it’s only natural that this trove would have greater resonance for the owner than for a stranger. Junk is converted into treasure by memory as a way of slowing our evanescence.

But it’s only in the final section, in which Sobelle magically retrieves from a single box an entire life span of goods (from baby diapers to reading glasses and vials of pills), that “The Object Lesson” attains a density of surreal meaning. Beckett’s line that we “give birth astride of a grave” echoed in my mind as the seven ages of Sobelle’s belongings miraculously sprang from the small carton.

Roots are the last things to be pulled out, a seemingly endless stretch of them. The bit is overextended but quite suspenseful nonetheless: By the end, this storehouse of memorabilia has become synonymous with one man’s inner life, and it’s scary to think what might happen once it’s gone.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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‘The Object Lesson’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 6:30 p.m. Sundays; ends Oct. 4 (call for exceptions)

Tickets: $25 to $55 (subject to change)

Info: (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes, with no intermission