Assessment: In ‘Dimanche,’ a Local weather Emergency Involves Keep

A clown present and a local weather tragedy, “Dimanche,” a collaboration between the Belgian corporations Focus and Chaliwaté, makes a comedy of the local weather disaster. Absurd and practically wordless, the brisk 75-minute present at BAM Fisher consists of a sequence of vignettes. Each is a devastating instance of the local weather emergency, expressed playfully — with toys, puppetry, acrobatics and nifty sensible results. “Dimanche” succeeds, in its macabre, elliptical manner, in bringing the problem dwelling, with tornadoes whooshing dinner from the desk and a shark swimming by a flooded lounge. The disaster, it’s right here, there, all over the place already.

The play, written and directed by Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud, who additionally star, begins someplace within the Arctic Circle. As “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” performs, a three-person digital camera crew bump alongside of their van, wanting to seize footage of a glacier calving. The shoot nearly instantly goes awry and the crew shrinks to 2. An analogous catastrophe befalls an expertly puppeteered polar bear and her cub. (Although on condition that polar bears are prodigious swimmers, this sequence appears extra melodramatic than seemingly.)

In the third sequence, set in an strange dwelling, the issue of warming has traveled south. A husband and spouse and his mom (one other exceptional puppet) swelter of their lounge as a number of followers blow ineffectually. The warmth then grows so horrible that the very furnishings begins to soften, just like the clocks in Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” imagery as disturbing as it’s pleasant. These strikes between the digital camera crew, the pure world and the home area repeat as first a twister after which a tsunami threaten. There are extra Paul Simon songs, too. Our phantasm of management over the setting, it’s slip sliding away.

Simon’s lyrics apart, phrases are sparse on this manufacturing and fully untranslated. (What spoken language there may be, it’s in Bulgarian.) The title, the French phrase for Sunday, is rarely defined, although it suggests the late-in-the-day nature of the disaster. Gorgeously realized and sneakily terrifying, the play strikes restively from the foolish to the dreadful and forwards and backwards once more. I used to be instructed that “Dimanche” was acceptable for school-age youngsters. This will depend upon how a lot your youngsters benefit from the violent, weather-related deaths that finish most sequences.