Tim Crouch is a  powerful actor. I would say domineering, which is half praise, half insult.  He stars in An Oak Tree, an experience he wrote for himself and another actor now playing at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. through Feb. 14.  

Constantly moving with a sinuous grace, like a wise but angry cat, his pure confidence is almost abusive. He commands the stage, controls every moment, and never loses his self-indulgent ambition.  

I hesitate to call this a play, as it is more of a monument to theatrical megalomania. Perhaps “performance art” is a more descriptive title.  

Avoiding any story-telling structure (like a true beginning, middle, and end), he expects us to follow this narrative closely, despite its deliberate and maddening obtuseness.  

It unfolds from different directions. Events are repeated ad nauseum. It was impossible to care about anyone.  (There’s only two.)

There was whimsy at work here: not a plan. Indeed, he disingenuously asks the other actor: “Do you think this work is contrived”—meaning the “play” itself. At times using a microphone and loudspeakers, at times whispering into the ear of the other actor, at times blasting some unholy music, it was hard to navigate with this journey.  

Crouch plays a stage hypnotist who, we learn from repeated exposition, has killed a girl in a car accident. The gimmick of the evening is this: a well-known actor is pressed to come on stage and play the father of the girl.

Crouch loses no time in taking over, always explaining what is going on. He is good at talking to the audience to bring them into the joke.

This night we saw movie actor Peter Gallagher (Sex, Lies, And Videotape, The Player) come up as the hapless foil after having Mike Myers, David Hyde Pierce, and F. Murray Abraham as past guest actors.

Presumably, Gallagher knew nothing of the “plot” of the experience he was about to subject himself to. (I don’t think so.)  

But not to worry, Crouch provided a clipboard with a script to read from. Using stage hypnotist jargon (“When I count to three and snap my fingers, you will...”), he had Gallagher go through some rather embarrassing moments while under a spell such as playing a non-existent piano.

Later, Crouch told him he had never played the piano, but Gallagher insisted he had. The events got so convoluted it was impossible to tell who was kidding whom?  

Somewhere toward the end Gallagher got quite poetical while still reading from the clipboard. The oak tree was mentioned, but I must admit I so desperately wanted this pretentious thing to end I wasn’t paying attention any more.

In the program Crouch has provided some enlightening dialog where he philosophically explains to us dummies that the eponymous oak tree is really a glass of water! Got that, folks? A glass of water.

Despite the critical success he has garnered, in part by utilizing the trick of bringing well-known actors into the mix, what Crouch desperately needs, in my opinion, is a real play, perhaps Shakespeare, to put his remarkable talents into. But clearly he is much too brilliant to do something so ordinary.  If he would, I suggest he start with Richard III.  Then we can discern if there is anything more to him than ego.

For more information, visit www.odysseytheatre.com.