Dog offers love lessons, ruff-edged aesthetic

With Valentine's Day approaching at an alarming rate, the bleak emotions conjured by the title of poet Charles Bukowski's book Love is a Dog from Hell may resonate with an increasingly large audience. It is just this type of meditation on love and loss that is the force behind Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern's new play, A Dog From Hell, showing this weekend at the Duke Coffeehouse.

An adaptation of the original work Up Styx Creek, written by Cheryl Chamblee and Tamara Kissane of Durham-based Both Hands Theatre Company, A Dog From Hell features characters from Greek mythology interacting in a modern hell. The play gains much of its dynamism from its live contemporary score, which includes music by Duffy and David Byrne. The overall aesthetics of the adaptation were in fact influenced by director Dana Marks' experience at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert.

"I started to listen to his music again, and I realized that this is what I want," he said. "This is the kind of world that I want to live in."

Anyone familiar with Cave's lyrical grunge can visualize the seedy underworld bar, the scruffy rock-star-like Hades and the whimsically drug-addled gatekeeper that populate the show. The use of gripping contemporary music, combined with the atypical theater space of the Coffeehouse, highlights the performance's efforts to create a universally relevant production.

"We wanted to do it in a place like the Coffeehouse... to give people a very familiar and identifiable context," Marks said.

The performance's engagement with the audience goes beyond the setting as actors talk to and crawl around the viewers. The result is an oft-startling interaction between scene and spectator that becomes the show's highlight.

"I think that most people are surprised, and that's what we want," Marks said. "We want people to be a little off-kilter so that they're not complacent."

A Dog From Hell shows Feb. 12 to 14 at the Duke Coffeehouse on East Campus and Feb. 15 at the Pinhook, 117 W. Main St. All shows start at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12 Thursday and Friday and $15 Saturday and Sunday.