The Undertaking at BAM Fisher

For the ancients, it was essential: a journey unto the land of the dead as the only means of retrieving something crucial to life. In The Undertaking, writer-director Steve Cosson and theater company The Civilians (Rimbaud in New York, 2016 Winter/Spring) offer a playful and profound 21st-century take on that underworld excursion. Using transcripts of actual conversations with shamen, morticians, philosophers, and mystics as their script, two actors toe the precipice, inhabiting the twilight between being and non-being, transcendent visions with ayahuasca, flirtations with existential dread, and bouts of cosmic bliss. Inventive video and sound contribute to this engrossing attempt to see the unseeable, moving toward the light while illuminating how to live.