The Pit: Architecting

For three years now, with the National Theatre of Scotland, this award-winning troupe of experimental New Yorkers have been treading a metaphorical Mason-Dixon line: mining the rich ideological seam of how the Yankees view their poor, southern State relations. 'New Orleans: Gone with the Wind' might sum up their conclusion. Though on reflection, Theatre of the Emerging American Moment has more prolongued fun with this sentence than it really seems to merit.

Under director Rachel Chavkin the company explodes every narrative convention going, along with a tinderbox of race relations, corseted concepts of femininity, gallantry and Southern charm. It's a heady brew, though Margaret Mitchell, 'Gone With the Wind's author, pitches up early on and attempts to impose some semblance of order on the crazed cabal of characters. A crass cliché of a film producer is out to give the 1939 Hollywood movie a racially acceptablemake-over. Scarlett herself, disinterred babbling from the bowels ofa typewriter, stalks the stage in petticoats, ever the Southern spitfire. She'll never go hungry again, having lately invested heavily in real estate in post Hurricane-Katrina New Orleans. Meanwhile, a young architect tries to rebuild the city, a desperate petrol-pump attendant to raze it, and a sultry Southern Belle looks vainly for her exit route out.

Delirious, physically accomplished, and endlessly inventive, the show's sheer bravura is a delight. But while narrative fragmentation is vital to this exploration of one, dark corner of the American psyche, it tips over too often into a naggingsensation of aimless, indulgentmeandering. TEAM stand in sore need of more editorial, intellectual rigour, and a lot less marginal, distracting film flammery to truly make good on their quite astonishing promise.