John Jesurun's "Stopped Bridge of Dreams" at La MaMa If Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams and William Gibson had gotten together, maybe become a little drunk, and decided to pull a literary all-nighter, the resulting collaboration might have had something of the flavor of John Jesurun's "Stopped Bridge of Dreams." The 75-minute production, which is being presented by La MaMa, evokes numerous authors, and is inspired by the floating world stories of the 17th-century Japanese writer Saikaku Ihara. Yet the voice here - mad, poetic and unsettling - is entirely Mr. Jesurun's. To the extent that the performance situates itself anywhere beyond the unstable rush of contemporary existence, it is in a modern-day house of pleasure operating within a jet as it streaks from one port of call to the next. The audience sits lengthwise in La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theater, flanking a spare set that is dominated by two large, rotating video screens, so that the field of action has something of the claustrophobia of a long flight. The screens sometimes regurgitate live images, capturing the performers from various angles as they lash each other and themselves with philosophical monologues, veiled threats and vulgar insults. Much of the verbal jousting occurs between Mrs. X (Black-Eyed Susan) and Hiroshi (Preston Martin), who are in charge, as much as anyone can be here, and who may or may not be mother and son. "I realized that my existence was in itself not enough," Mr. Martin explains in his Southern drawl, his voice and body languid yet coiled, as if his character had sashayed out of a late play by Tennessee Williams (Mr. Jesurun gives the playwright an explicit nod). And later: "I want my passport. We have landed in Horikawa, and I want off the flying whorehaus of your mind. But of course there is no escape from this post-national, late capitalist, technological endgame. Streaks of light and color shoot across the dark screens, suggesting the endless trafficking of goods and information. And, of course, misinformation; Mr. Jesurun is adept at playing with those gaps between what we know and think we know, and all of the hazy possibilities surrounding the petty certainties to which we cling. We see the repeated image of planes coming in low, over wintry landscapes or anonymous grids of light and darkness. We never see them land. Mr. Jesurun treats his actors like found objects, setting their vocal qualities and idiosyncratic deliveries against his language and allowing for a certain live mayhem to destabilize the finely calibrated text. On Sunday an indescribably marvelous "haiku slam" between guest performers Olive Dawley (a sixth grader) and Judith Malina (the founder of the Living Theater) threatened to upend "Stopped Bridge of Dreams." But no. The flying house of pleasure stayed its singular course.