Noir takes a surreal turn in ‘The Tenement’ at ASU

Garrison Keillor meets Franz Kafka in “The Tenement,” a surreal spin on pulp fiction at Arizona State University that’s a little bit creepy, a little bit campy and a whole lotta cool.

With a couple of Jazz Age song-and-dance routines thrown in for good measure, this world-premiere production by ASU’s School of Theatre and Film juxtaposes two parallel story lines — or three, really.

In the opening scene, a company of voice actors performs a cheesy radio drama called “The Man Who Lost the World,” complete with live sound effects and organ music a la Keillor’s “Guy Noir” spoof on “A Prairie Home Companion.” The dimenovel plot involves an amnesiac antihero searching for the mysterious Woman in Red, an on-air romance that stirs some off-the-air drama among the performers.

Meanwhile, in the same “real” world where those actors collect a paycheck from Empire Broadcasting Co. by reading ads for the Empire Tobacco Co., a tale far darker than any noir mystery is playing out inside yet another subsidiary of the reigning megacorporation.

It starts in a seedy apartment where an oversize rat kills a man in self-defense, then takes over his body and becomes an everyman named Buddy, a mute innocent adrift in a world of greed, corruption and violence. Naturally, Buddy — sporting a giant rat’s head and tail that nobody seems to notice — gets a job as an exterminator for Empire Services, where he gets into a spot of trouble when he meets a slinky, rat-faced girl work by Lyons and Daniel Brodie that was first performed at Cave Arts Space in Brooklyn.

The expanded version is an example of postmodernism at its best, taking familiar tropes and reimagining them into something fresh and provocative. Using a bare-bones set of industrial scaffolding augmented by video projections and bold lighting, Keuter and his design team succeed in creating an alternate universe onstage that’s a funhouse-mirror reflection of our own.

Speaking of fun, composer Robin Vining and choreographer Nathaniel Shaw have whipped up a pair of frenetic flapper numbers set at a cabaret called the Cat’s Club. Headlined by J.H. Hendricks as the sultry Woman in Red, these might seem to be mere adornments, but their dark, sexy energy help keep the tone of “The Tenement” balanced on the knife edge between absurdity and artiness.

Sometimes the frosting makes the cake.