Under the Radar: Venturing to Fantastical Universes With a Dodo and More

The new show “Dead as a Dodo” opens with the word “Bone!” Followed by “Death! Death! Death!” This isn’t the kind of dialogue you’d expect from something advertised for ages 7 and up, but no matter how young its audience members are, the company Wakka Wakka never underestimates their intelligence and willingness to engage in serious matters.

This sort of experimentation is par for the course at the annual Under the Radar festival, now on stages across New York City. It’s just that “Dead as a Dodo,” one of 33 works in the festival, does it better. From a formal perspective, it is among the most ceaselessly inventive pieces of theater I have seen in the past year.

Written and directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage with help from the ensemble, the piece follows the adventures of a long-dead boy and his best friend, a dodo — a flightless bird extinct since the 17th century — in a spooky underworld. Both of them have been reduced to skeletons at first, and the action starts off with the boy looking for bones to replace his missing ones.

The show, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center through Feb. 9, is as morbidly poetic as “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It immerses the audience in a fantastical universe — at one point, plunging underneath the fiery river Styx — thanks to outlandishly inventive puppetry (Waage designed the figures), projections (by Erato Tzavara), lighting (by Daphne Agosin) and audio (sound and original music by Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson).

The hell we are in may be of our own making: “Dead as a Dodo” concludes Wakka Wakka’s eco-minded trilogy, following “Animal R.I.O.T.” and “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” and is concerned with the evolution of the natural and human worlds. The bigger story here is concerned with new beginnings, and it is told gorgeously.