Students up to challenge of visit to uneasy world

University theater sometimes has the luxury of forgetting about the pressures of marketing, providing a troupe the opportunity to put on sumptuous productions of relatively obscure and challenging works.

Such is the case with the sinuous presentation of Jose Rivera’s apocalyptic “Marisol” by the Ohio State University Department of Theatre.

The play, first produced in 1992, shares a sense of end-ofmillennium anxiety — and some unorthodox religious imagery — with Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”

Like the latter, “Marisol” is set in New York at a time when the city seemed on the verge of self-destruction.

The sensitive, repressed title character (Jasmine Michelle Smith) — born and raised in the Bronx — works in publishing in Manhattan and, at night, returns to a tiny apartment in a dangerous neighborhood.

With the help of her militant guardian angel (Cheyanne Tutt), she narrowly escapes a brutal beating on a subway platform, but her life then begins to spiral out of control.

After a weird encounter at work, she goes home with feisty coworker June (Ronda Christie), where she learns that June’s erratic brother, Lenny (Shawn Zylberberg), has erected a shrine to her.

By the second act, Marisol’s reality, already tenuous, has further broken down. Landmarks have disappeared, as has the moon; north and south have switched directions.

Marisol seeks help from a disfigured man (a jaunty Isaiah Johnson) and a wealthy woman (a powerful Eve Nordyke), both in even more psychological trouble than Marisol herself.

The two-act play — with its unsettling combination of surreal situations, poetic language, dark comedy and political consciousness — could be difficult to carry off successfully, but Beth Kattelman’s fluid direction gives each facet of the play a chance to shine, and the actors ground the sometimes-showy language in concrete portrayals.

Smith’s Marisol, on edge for good reason, goes through a convincing journey into darkness during the course of the play. Christie’s robust, energetic June supplies much of the play’s humor, as well as its heart. Zylberberg is alternately subtly and overtly disturbing as an artist manque.

Kelsey Gallagher’s dim, foggy lighting and Lee Williams’ artfully distorted city soundscape add to the sense of creepiness of Justin A. Miller’s intricately decrepit set, in the corners and background of which four actors playing homeless people constantly catch the corner of the viewer’s eye.

Audiences willing to risk an unsettling voyage into an outof-kilter world should relish this one.