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Cardiac Organ: A Goth Cabaret, the latest production from the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, makes merry with death—and asks the audience to literally join in on the cackle. Yet it is also one of the most tender shows you will see this season.
Death can be terrifying, funny, monotonous or bizarre. PETE succeeds in painting a theatrical portrait of loss in all its colors, with this series of peculiar scenes and raucous songs that involve the audience in increasingly inventive ways.
Directed by Jacob Coleman and written by Christopher Gonzalez (a PETE company member who has written for WW in the past), Cardiac Organ immediately obliterates your expectations. To find the auditorium, you first walk through a vast, warehouselike space, then pass through a door marked by a menacing neon symbol.
Beyond that door lies a darkened stage, where you witness a trio of mischievous spirits (played by Rebecca Lingafelter, Cristi Miles and Amber Whitehall) reckon with their post-mortal existence with the help of an accompanying band (the musicians are Kora Link, Ezri Galban Reyes and Mark Valadez).
Cardiac Organ is less a narrative than an anthology of spooky tales and tunes. Early on, you may wonder what the heck you’re watching (in a good way!)—especially when one of the actors inexplicably appears dressed as a rabbit—but as the play progresses, it begins to swell with purpose and emotion.
I first realized I was digging the show when the audience was enlisted to collectively embody a monster who cackles and cries, “Your lover is no longer among the living!” It’s just one of many instances in which the play impishly toys with the idea of death.
Yet while Cardiac Organ is outrageously funny (there’s an especially hilarious/nasty joke about millipedes munching on a certain part of the human body), it is also unexpectedly powerful in its depiction of grief. Even the simplest asides—like a character saying that ghosts sometimes get lost—are freighted with feeling.
Best of all is the finale. I won’t spoil the show’s wondrous concluding flourish, but I will say that the end involves both the actors and the audience singing, “’Cause your mornings will be brighter/Break the line/Tear up rules/Make the most of a million times no.”
It’s hard to imagine a more heartfelt or necessary sentiment. In a decade when a bright morning often seems like an agonizingly distant prospect, PETE has made the shining horizon feel just a bit closer.
SEE IT: Cardiac Organ: A Goth Cabaret plays at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 15 NE Hancock St., 971-258-2049, petensemble.org. 8 pm Wednesday-Saturday, through July 8.