Puzzle-like 57-scene play in restored San Francisco theater enthralls

[Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

I couldn’t help fantasizing at A.C.T.’s experimental “Love and Information.”

English playwright Caryl Churchill’s plot-less, 57-scene scattergun technique goaded me into it.

I had the distinct impression she’d dreamed — before writing this play — that Samuel Beckett, spouting weighty sentence fragments, was pitted against Harpo Marx’s deadpan and wide-eyed comedic facial exaggerations while Ingmar Bergman flashed myriad disparate images on a split-screen behind them.

“Love and Information,” playing at the refurbished Strand Theater, introduced me to some 140 mostly unnamed characters in 100 minutes.

Through a stellar 12-member cast that magically spun many of the vignettes into gold.

Enthralling.

Yet, finally, a touch frustrating.

As if someone had stolen more than a few pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle I was being asked to put together.

Because so many of the pieces were mere fragments (ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes), audience members got to plug the holes from our personal histories and baggage — though we had to think fast because the next scene always tested our minds instantly after the last, much like one Henny Youngman gagline following another without a breath.

My favorite moments included two men humorously and poignantly misremembering yesterday’s love affair, two teens freaked out because they didn’t know a personal detail about a crush on a guy they both had, two dudes discussing an apparent direct message from God, and a woman reflecting about life and death after being gifted with a red rose.

Not exactly light subjects.

But being inundated with technology was the main target of Churchill’s stylized shorthand, with lust and longing (as opposed to love) finishing a distant second.

By not writing stage directions or character descriptions into the text, and by suggesting vignettes could move from any of the seven segments to another, she gave directors and their whims plenty of latitude.

“Love and Information,” therefore, has varied radically from city to city.

Here, director Casey Stangl did astonishingly well — especially since I occasionally felt as though a carnival mirror had been shattered and I was left to reassemble endless shards.

Introducing the first show produced at the refurbished Strand, Carrie Perloff, the American Conservatory Theater’s longtime artistic director, cited Stangl’s having successfully built the production while the house was “being built around her.”

Perloff also referenced the old Strand, where she teasingly suggested theatergoers might have caught films like “The Rocky Horror Show” or “Deep Throat.”

“Love and Information,” which opened in London in 2012, felt a gadzillion miles from such classic movies — in both tone and concept.

It had no overall arc or linear storyline. Its scenes left the sensation of being almost randomized.

Perhaps because of those elements, the rebuilt 283-seat theater, which cost almost $35 million (and includes an even more intimate stage, The Rueff, which seats only 140), seemed like an ideal venue.

The huge onstage screen in effect became the set. Movable, unattached doors were basically the only addition (except for various tables and chairs used as props).

Before the show on opening night, actors mingled with the lobby crowd and performed shtick such as dancing wildly to plugged-in music, burying oneself almost catatonically in an iPhone, coughing and sneezing loudly and frequently. A huge LED screen flashed brief previews of what was to come inside — plus other glimpses of items relating to communication (such as binary numbers, Pig Latin and a tagger spraying graffiti with gaudy paint).

Inside, the screen at the rear of the stage — which later would feature eclectic images that incorporated photos of Market Street — showed a live feed of the audience itself.

Besides the quasi-trauma of seeing myself projected, I was subjected to a surreal moment:

Early in the play, a patron’s cell phone went off, adding a bouncy pop tune to the ambience. Had I not been sitting next to the guy, I undoubtedly would have thought it was yet another disconnected part of the play.

Unlike Churchill’s “Cloud Nine,” “Top Girls” or “Serious Money,” “Love and Information” might be a perfect fit for anyone with a short attention span.

And maybe — in today’s exhaustingly frenetic fast-everything world in which “USA Today” and “TMZ” head the most-read, most-watched lists — that could apply to all of us.

“Love and Information” plays at the American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco, through Aug. 9. Night performances, 7 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, Matinees, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tickets: $40 to $100. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net