CHICAGO.- The visual effects are as breathtaking as the story is intense in the darkly poetic dreamscapes of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Hey Girl! Meant to fascinate and provoke the imagination, this most recent project by the radical Italian theater company creates a world that is both beautiful and horrific. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Hey Girl!, Friday-Saturday, January 18-19, 2008.

Hey Girl! is an intense symbolic work that follows a girl’s evolution from birth through the brutality of adolescence to the sexual independence and power of womanhood. In the opening scene, set on a foggy stage with moody lighting, the story’s heroine sheds a liquid silicon cocoon. The goo drips to the floor as the young woman’s naked form emerges. The central character, played by two actresses, is torn between the roles of Joan of Arc and Juliet – on the one hand driven to fight for her freedom and on the other being bound by the constraints that history and culture attach to the female role.

Performed in English with sparse narration, Hey Girl! borrows famous passages from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Director Romeo Castellucci transforms the stage with his raw architectural sets, large-scale paintings and sculpture, video projections, and exploding glass. Chicago-based composer Scott Gibbons lends his ingenuity with electro-acoustic music to Hey Girl!’s sound score, creating an otherworldly experience.

Motivated by the challenge to produce theater that incites all of the senses, Castellucci and Gibbons use sound design and visual tableau to construct charged atmospheres that are enigmatic, surreal, and unforgettable.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio was founded in 1981 by Castellucci, his sister Claudia, and his wife, Chiara Guidi. Their work was first seen in the Midwest at the MCA in 2002 with their Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). Influenced by the visual and sound arts, science and technology, and science fiction and fantasy, Sanzio’s works have solidified their place at the forefront of experimental theater and earned them an international reputation for fierce, radical, and riveting productions. Their ardent approach has not gone unnoticed by government agencies either. In 1994 the Italian Ministry of Art and Culture moved to ban their productions and revoke their public support. In response, the company organized an International Convention of Theatre Censorship in their city of origin, Cesena, Italy, and was subsequently awarded the Ubu prize for resistance in 1996.

Castellucci studied the plastic arts and graduated with a degree in scenic design and painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. He is strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” and often casts actors who are physically deformed or different – his Mark Antony had had a laryngotomy, his Lucifer was anorexic, and in Genesi his Adam was a professional contortionist.

The MCA presents Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Hey Girl! on Friday-Saturday, January 18-19, at 7:30 pm, on the MCA Stage, 220 East Chicago Avenue. Performance tickets ($19-24) are available at the MCA Box Office at 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org. Student tickets to MCA performance programs are $10 and subject to availability. For more information, visit the MCA website at www.mcachicago.org. This performance is recommended for mature audiences.