‘Navigator’ a moving feast for the imagination

Through October 13

Audience members headed to 7 Stages’ latest show expecting to settle comfortably into their seats to watch a bit of drama unfold are in for a big surprise.

“The Navigator” is being produced at the Goat Farm Arts Center, a former cotton gin factory on a 12-acre complex near Howell Mill Road in West Midtown Atlanta. The interactive, multimedia performance invites audience members to actively follow the story through the crumbling brick Victorian warehouses, the courtyards, the woods, the paths, and all the nooks and crannies of the beautifully evocative property.

“The Navigator,” based on the best-selling young adult fantasy novel by Eoin McNamee, tells the story of Owen (Kyle Brumley), a young man who discovers that time is being turned backwards by villainous beings called the Harsh. He joins a group of Resisters, an army fighting the Harsh, and helps them search for the Mortmain, a mysterious device that will help set time back on its proper course.

The production is the brainchild of Michael Haverty, Associate Artistic Director at 7 Stages and formerly of the Center for Puppetry Arts, and it’s visually stunning. Many of the settings, like an enormous meeting hall for the Resisters with its dramatic lighting and draped red flags, have the scale and quality of great movie sets. Even better, the show often has the quality of a surreal dream. Midway through the performance, the villain Johnston (Adam Lowe) finally appears, and his entrance elicits stunned gasps: he is fifteen feet tall, an actor on stilts with enormous puppetlike hands. The best costumes of the show undoubtedly belong to the Bog Hounds, two frightening creatures whose hair seems to be of moss, their eyes red lights, their limbs and spines made of old, knotted branches.

Audiences must wend their way through the property, and there are staff and cast members to help guide them along. But “mind the step,” must be said so often it can disrupt the sense of being swept away by the performance, and since so much terrain is covered, the directive often becomes “mind the stump” and “mind the pipe” and so on. The property is dark, the ground uneven, and audience members are often impelled to move quickly in keeping with the concept that we are participating in the adventure. It’s definitely a show for the young and the young-at-heart (and limb).

Moving from place to place takes time as well, and though the script is fleet and spare, at about two hours, the show is not a short one. One of the impressive skills of the talented ensemble of actors is their ability to keep their focus, managing to stay engaged without doing or saying anything that would make the arriving audience members feel as though they missed something, before they begin a scene. Occasional environmental noise, trains passing very close by or music from a nearby car radio, can disturb the performance as well.

Some of the sci-fi fantasy archetypes the story employs — the young man in search of home, the cackling villain, the clumsy henchmen, the eccentric inventor, the magic object that must be found to help the hero on his quest — can often veer dangerously close to cliches. And though the narrative is perfectly understandable in the macro sense, many of the particulars get lost in the shuffle. I’m certain if I would have had a 13-year-old with me, she could have explained everything in great detail, but I actually had no idea what sort of help the Long Woman had given Owen, no idea what the big white humming obelisk thing was, no idea why there were creatures inside of it. But I did know it was the big final scene, that Owen would have to do battle to save the universe and so on.

Still, it’s a fantastically fun evening, a tour de force of design and imagination. The show is probably best suited to imaginative young people in the 10-16 age range. Kids old enough for the scary parts of Harry Potter and haunted houses at Halloween will have a blast, especially during scenes in which they’re asked to help out and participate in battles against the Harsh. As for their parents running along behind them, trying to keep up, that, as they say, is another story.