A masterpiece of the inane.

Seven Deadly Pleasures, Fri. & Sat., Sept. 5 & 6 at TIXE, 113 W. 42nd St. (betw. 6th Ave. & B'way), 212-592-4644.

While the Howl! Festival in late August was recreating the early- 80s vibe of the East Village, perhaps the most profoundly entertaining affirmation of bizarreness was happening at the most unlikely of spaces: the artistic void surrounding Bryant Park. The Laboratory Theater's Seven Deadly Pleasures, starring exiled Berliners Heinrich (Corey Dargel) and his best girl Elsa (Sheila Donovan) is at its lightest moments reminiscent of Mike Myers' Sprockets ("Ladies and Gentleman, first a little dance," says Heinrich) and at its most absurd, a relative of Richard Foreman's theatrics, punctuated with perfectly enumerated gong and breaking-glass cues.

Conceived by Dargel, a composer whose catchy tunes can get stuck in your head for days, Donovan, the hyperactive lead singer of the Tall Boys, and Yvan Greenberg, the directorial force behind the Laboratory Theater and a dancer to boot, the piece can best be described as a German Expressionist cabaret act with texts adapted from Goethe, Hesse, Buchner and Wedekind, with the music of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern supplementing Dargel's original works. At first glance the show is a haphazard web of song, dance, humor, video art and improv, but looking further we see an entanglement of streams that eventually unite in a statement of esthetic purity under the guise of the absurd.

As the crowd fills the adorable theater, at the back of a former midtown retail space reclaimed by Chashama, Heinrich and Elsa are engaged in a lively discussion drowned out by commentary of a baseball game, in which, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing was happening. This Beckett-like scene is interrupted at least 10 minutes into the show with a burst of laughter that brings Elsa to the floor. Removing a roll of tape from his wrist, Heinrich boxes her in, thus presenting the first of many inexplicable stunts (by the end, the floor is a kaleidoscope of geometric shapes).

But while you are trying to figure out the cryptic number games that the two play with each other throughout or what motivates them to abruptly abandon the act to take a shot of whiskey, something beautiful happens: Dargel's music. The perfect reconciliation between pop and the avant-garde, minimalism and modernism, Dargel's songs are misleading in their apparent simplicity. Purposefully warped by sub-par intonation and jarring rhythmic divergences, moments of delicate harmonies bubble out of the messy songs, foreshadowing the stunning beauty of the finale.

Amidst the songs is a confusing barrage of humor flecked with intentionally bad timing, and misfired jokes fall dead under the heaviness of German reputation. But the presentation alone is worth a laugh, and there are many pricelessly ridiculous moments: a lengthy video of naked men playing soccer, and "guest performer #2," a German sailor who appears on the video screen singing, in German along with a real-time translation, about the bad food on the ship, to name a few. In typical German style, it is what is not meant to be funny that proves the most laughable.

Greenberg's movement direction seems primarily inspired by the work of two expressionist German choreographers, Pina Bausch and Mary Wigman. From Heinrich's eerie rotations complete with detached open-mouthed, wide-eyed facial expression to Elsa's ceaseless careening into walls, it is no wonder that the word "deadly" appears in the title. As the show unfolds, the rip in Elsa's stocking begin's to get bigger and the redness on her knees from many violent episodes becomes more noticeable. Despite inconsistent accents (part of the shtick, I imagine), the two performers don't ever let up.