THE MILLION BELLS OF OCEAN, American Theater Company. Human beings and sentient household objects happily coexist in Edward Mast’s off-kilter, hypertheatrical world. In fact that’s probably the most realistic aspect of The Million Bells of Ocean, which introduces a barrage of absurdities: street gangs conversing in ancient Aztec tongues, earwigs delivering edicts from the heavens. Encouraging the audience to get caught up in a series of theatrical mind games, Mast constantly sets up expectations, then gleefully topples them. Wrapped in his layers of artifice, however, is a painfully honest story of three generations of men coming to terms with one another. This is a rare work necessitating multiple readings, as fascinating for its metatheatrical dismantling of the Western canon as for its simple meditation on the nature of creativity.
