Aztec Hotel

Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

"The final image in "Aztec Hotel," one of two works by Poland's Teatr Cogitatur now running in rotating repertory at the Chopin Theatre, features a beautiful, bare-backed woman lying face down on the ground, nearly buried in lush red rose petals.

It is so reminiscent of that scene in Sam Mendes' 1999 film "American Beauty" -- the one in which actress Mena Suvari is similarly bathed in rose petals -- that you may begin to wonder which director, Mendes or Poland's Witold Izdebski (and his collaborator, Katarzyna Mrozinska-Izdebska) -- saw the other's work.

No matter: The scene is a dream of perfection -- the ultimate fantasy of youth, beauty and the fullness of life captured in that precarious moment when the greatest glory is just about to flip into an awareness of mortality.

No one who has seen Cogitatur's other production, "La Luna," will fail to realize that this is an ensemble with a signature style -- a theater of poetry animated by light, sound, movement, color and powerful images that seem to emerge from the darkness in a few moments of blinding luminescence, and then retreat back into the void.

There is no script at work, aside from such rambling lines as "We don't know ourselves or anything else." But the images created by the actors and designers conjure a kind of erotically charged delirium that allows you to free-float and associate, to weave your own dream or nightmare scenarios for a time-out-of-mind hour in the theater.

The Aztec Hotel, like the jazzy La Luna nightclub, is a state of mind. In this case, it seems to be inhabited by beings from another universe who land here thanks to their strong but delicate wings (the images of flight are gorgeous, with hints of Icarus and Leonardo da Vinci and even the Wright brothers). “It always comes to an end," intones one of the characters. And then we see a man in a dense fog, running furiously in place, and two winged creatures perched atop towers -- a vision eerily evocative of the World Trade Center attack and those who jumped in terror.

The actors of Teatr Cogitatur are as physically expressive as dancers, with the men's almost cadaverously thin bodies an eloquent embodiment of the human form on the edge of life and death. There is rain, wind and fire in "Aztec Hotel." There is flight and stasis. There is pleasure and pain" –