May 28, 2003

A TWO-headed calf peers glassy-eyed out at Yerba Buena Gardens from the balcony above the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Waterfall. A taxidermied mutant, the frozen calf looks like it would really rather be decaying underground in dank, wormy peace. But this undead calf is on a tight schedule.

Just a few hours ago the bovine specimen embarked on a marathon journey of self-discovery. By 2 p.m. on this sunny Saturday afternoon, it's already made appearances at the giant sundial in Ingleside and at Grace Cathedral. From Yerba Buena the calf will travel to a record store in the Haight, stop in for an early dinner at Joe's Cable Car Restaurant, and visit Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the East Bay at dusk, all leading up to a very late night on a 500-foot-long ship floating in the bay.

The calf is shadowing its owner, Henry Rosenthal, a 48-year-old San Francisco film producer. At daybreak tomorrow morning the calf will be up early to stand trial for all of Rosenthal's worldly sins. Rosenthal will be the only member of the jury on this shipboard trial, forced to cast judgment on the two-headed calf, either convicting the freakish bifurcated beast of his own crimes or acquitting the pathetic thing – and himself. But Rosenthal doesn't know any of this yet.

Rosenthal, who's anointing his hands in the King Memorial waterfall at Yerba Buena, has just had his first unnerving experience in a day that will only grow more disturbing. As he was talking to a friend, an impostor Henry Rosenthal butted in and started bragging about his two-headed calf. A quizzical crowd gathered around. Soon everyone was ignoring the real Rosenthal. He'd been replaced.

After his cleansing visit to the waterfall, Rosenthal will be led into the Metreon, instructed to change out of his habitual all-black garb and into a white suit. He's already lost much of the other armor of his daily life, like his van and his cell phone. His wallet, shoes, and socks will go later when he's abducted in a coffin by two undertakers he's never met before.

Rosenthal's been cast as the star in a play that has some 30 other actors. And Rosenthal's the only one who doesn't have the script. It's a paranoid's darkest fantasy and most fervent wish realized – for one day the universe really is sending Rosenthal symbolic messages, tailored to his hopes, insecurities, dreams, and fears. Rosenthal's role is simply to accept the gift, if he can stand it.

By the time he appears at the calf's trial the next morning, Rosenthal will be exhausted from his ordeal, sweaty and bloody from a fierce battle he's fought late at night with three witches. Successfully defending his "meat heart" – a ball of meat wrapped in plastic wrap – from the witches, he'll end this battle in the fetal position in the vast ship's hold, the bloody meat heart clutched to his chest.

"Our medium is experience, and our palette is the whole person," says Abe Burickson, the 28-year-old architect who cocreated Rosenthal's mythic journey with Matthew Purdon, a 31-year-old multimedia artist. The journey was to be the culmination of a San Francisco State University extension course called "Experiments in Participatory Performance." But no students enrolled.

The instructors were undeterred. In the past two years they'd already created four of these so-called magical journeys for each other and their friends, the gift of an ephemeral experience designed solely for the subject.

To plan Rosenthal's journey, Purdon and Burickson extensively interviewed him about his personality, his tastes, and his life. Sample soul-searching question: "What would your younger self from 20 years ago say to you now?" They contacted some 50 of Rosenthal's friends, family members, and acquaintances to learn more about him and recruit them for the plot. "It took the kind of trust that a person would place in a therapist or clergyman," Rosenthal says. "I realized for this process to have any meaning for me, I would have to be completely forthcoming. I had to dig deep and open up all the skeletons."

After probing their subject, the collaborators conceived of a daylong symbolic journey that would dramatize his internal conflicts, climaxing in the trial, where he would cast judgment on himself through the figure of the calf. They corralled 10 of his friends to participate and 20 other coconspirators who were strangers to him. As the day unfolded, Rosenthal was constantly off-kilter, trying to guess who was in on the joke, what was planned, and what was spontaneous. "We create a sort of dream reality," Purdon says. "It's all virtual, but at some point it becomes more real than reality. The whole piece begins to take on its own energy. And it's beyond our role even as creators. We're sort of like imperfect Olympian gods."

Later, Rosenthal would say it was one of the most astounding days of his life, but also that it was almost unbearable to have his life subjected to that level of scrutiny and to be the subject of so much concentrated manipulation and attention.

But the real puppet master was himself. "The hand behind the journey guiding it was really my own," Rosenthal says. "In the end it was really everything I had fed to them that they turned back mirrorlike to me."

The two-headed calf was acquitted.

For more information, go to matthewpurdon.com/performance.