When a show requires that you read the source material (not to mention its CliffsNotes), can it stand on its own? Such is the case with The Waste Land, a demanding and dense dramatization of T.S. Eliot's seminal Modernist poem. Billed as "a collaboration between painter, actor and poet," this work is a theater/art hybrid devised by the brothers Domig: Christopher enacts Eliot's fragmented 1922 epic, and Daniel has designed the mutable set pieces and a haunting plaster puppet head. A skilled actor, Christopher valiantly attempts to elucidate the famously obscure verse by investing them with emotion, but there's little to grasp on to here. The shifts in point of view and tone are challenging for an audience to navigate, and clunky scenic rearrangements inhibit the flow. There are inventive moments; in Part II, "A Game of Chess," it's amusing when Christopher demands of the puppet, "Speak to me. Why do you never speak... I never know what you are thinking!" But overall, the affair has the feel of an ambitious graduate thesis. The siblings earn an A for effort, but a WTF for execution.—Raven Snook
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