WoW reviews: Quick hits on festival’s first day

With a rush of trippy sights and unconventional adventures, La Jolla Playhouse’s second Without Walls Festival is now up and running.

The three-day celebration of site-specific and immersive performance runs through Sunday, with two dozen or so shows and happenings in and around the Playhouse/UC San Diego Theatre District.

(Note that the Playhouse is running regular shuttles for those heading to the more far-flung WoW events, all of which are still in the general orbit of UCSD.)

The Festival Village is a bit more compact than was the case at the inaugural event in 2013, but still includes several food/beverage booths and a stage for live (free) music performances. Some of the festival shows also take place right in the village, which sits in the open area between the three Playhouse theaters.

Many of the shows have been hot sellers, so if you’re planning to go you’ll want to check on ticket availability first, (858) 550-1010 or wowfestival.org.

Here’s a quick look at a couple of shows we checked out on the first day of WoW (with plenty more to come):

“Grounded,” San Diego Rep

Potiker Theatre Trap Room (meet in Taper Plaza)

5 and 8:30 p.m. today and Sunday

The intense and affecting “Grounded” differs a bit from much of the WoW fare because it’s a scripted play that has been performed in more conventional theater spaces (including off-Broadway, in a production that starred Anne Hathaway).

But the WoW fest and San Diego Rep, which also staged the play earlier this year, have made this an immersive experience by placing it in the intimate trap room below the Potiker Theatre, with the audience nearly surrounding actor Heather Ramey as she performs the piece.

Ramey is excellent and deeply committed in the role of Pilot — an aviation-loving fighter jockey who has been flying missions overseas.

When she becomes pregnant, though, she is grounded, and subsequently put to work in a trailer on a remote base outside Las Vegas, where she pilots killer drones via remote control.

The darkened, airless room she works in is the same one we sit in, listening to her talk of the surreality of essentially clocking in for a 9-5 job killing people (or at least looking for people to kill) from halfway around the world.

Director Emilie Whelan and her team turn the space into an eerie wash of video static, ominous sound and blackness — a marked contrast to the Pilot’s former life (as she often talks about) in the wide blue sky.

And as we sit with the Pilot there in the dark, watching her fight against a kind of madness while she lines up a target in her sights, it’s hard not to feel implicated in this sanitized way of war.

As she says, speaking of the strangely godlike sensation of hovering unseen over the anonymous figures about to be attacked: “We see all, and we have pronounced you guilty.”

“Dances With Walls,” Jean Isaacs Dance Theatre

Begins at Wagner Dance Building

12, 12:45, 1:30, 2:15, 3, 3:45, 4:30 today and Sunday.

This inventive and varied dance piece takes WoW’s site-specific mission to heart, centering each of its three sections on stretches of walls (loosely defined) around the university campus.

In the first dance, “Obscura,” Desiree Cuizon-Fejeran and John Diaz perform a duet of passionate attraction (and forceful rejection) against an interior wall of the Wagner Dance Building’s lobby. They move with a lithe, serpentine fluidity to Adam Hurst’s music.

In “Soldiers (sic),” Blythe Barton, Zaquia Mahler Salinas and Kyle Sorensen perform a comical, military-esque dance, marching (and skulking) along a low wall near Galbraith Hall. At times they looked like drunken tin soldiers, swaying to the music of Hughes Le Bars.

The final piece, “Stonehenge,” is a dynamic and athletic dance that has Angel Acuña, Jill Breckenridge, Jessica Gilmore, Cecily Holcombe, Trystan Loucado, Minaqua McPherson and Erica Ruse forming geometric, ever-shifting groups on and around a monolithic set of sculptures.

When they suddenly rush at the audience (seated far back on the grass), it’s an almost confrontational moment that asserts a fierce sense of individuality (and nicely punctuates the show).