"I Feel Fine" | Annex's party opens new home

Up several flights in an old building on Capitol Hill, there's a party going on.

People are dancing frenetically. They're tossing multicolored confetti around. They're changing costumes every 10 minutes. They're passing platters of deviled eggs and playing a game we'll call Musical Electric Chair.

Festively crazed and apocalyptic without being a morbid drag, "I Feel Fine" is Annex Theatre's first show in its new home — a suitably scruffy little venue, vacated by the now-defunct Northwest Actors Studio.

Created by Rachel Hynes and Mike Pham with the rest of the 11-member cast, "I Feel Fine" is a freewheeling collage — in the boisterous, rebel spirit of such older experimental theater crews as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment.

While the Woosters deconstruct the classics with intellectual rigor, "I Feel Fine" riffs on a general theme, and not a terribly original one: the end of the world.

But before one starts to groan, the exuberant antics of "I Feel Fine" commence — and banish fears of pretentious gloom.

In bits and pieces, monologues and dances, this jacked-up, mock-New Year's bash radiates a giddy, desperate gaiety, a need to party before the boom falls.

There's a lot happening at once, onstage and in the aisles. People are stripping to don costumes. A woman moves up the aisles with a laptop, reading from a hilariously sappy Web site about cute puppies. Someone in a Kabuki mask is talking in a lingo only one other person comprehends. And victims are chosen, periodically, to "fry" in an electric chair — but not before singing a karaoke a version of a Blondie or Violent Femmes rock tune. A magician performs card tricks badly. Cellphones ring and actors drop out to take calls.

In all this carrying on, there's also the odd cry of protest. "I tried to love you, America," somebody laments, Allen Ginsberg-style, "but you filled the world with waterboarding dreams and tortured screams."

Though neo-Brechtian in its erasure of the audience-performer boundary, "I Feel Fine," isn't informative or deep as political art. But as a song-and-dance orgy about a fearful culture distracting itself into oblivion, it's vibrant and even heartwarming in its messy, feisty aliveness.

The maverick Annex has lasted 20 years, through changes of venue and members, partly because it keeps attracting young theatrical explorers such as Hynes and Pham.

"I Feel Fine" may be an ephemeral romp about boogying on the edge of the abyss. But it's also evidence that Annex is alive and kicking.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com