You walk through dimly lit corridors in the cellar of an old building, hung with silver spoons and gauzy tatters; giant insect-like contraptions move overhead, and suddenly there is a glimpse of an actor repetitiously reciting a line of Apollinaire's poem "Zone" — lying on a bed, reaching for a glass, or pacing in one of the various Halloweeny crypts along the way. There are wonderful fragments ripped from the poem ("the agony of love catches in your throat"), but without context they are merely evocations without meaning. The visual effects of this performance installation are often strong, but they seem to be in the service of Mark Lord's and Hiroshi Iwasaki's imaginations and not the poem. The poem "Zone" takes place in the mind of a man walking though both Paris and his memories, and this Fringe piece is often defeated by a need to literalize (and often incorrectly — for example, a "medlar" is not an orange but a relative of the pear).

One of the dangers of easy reverence for mysterious and important works is in losing your — and their — sense of humor: The pretentious weightiness in both the "Zone" installation and the theatrical companion that follows it, Beckett's A Piece of Monologue, distorts both works. The poem and the play are linked by morbid longings and obsessive memory, but Apollinaire was also relishing the rich variety of the contemporary world, and Beckett begins the monologue with one of the great grimly funny lines: "Birth was the death of him." (The only moment of the performance that captures this kind of humor is the suddenly, startlingly audible line, "Nothing to be heard anywhere.")

Edward Snyder's performance of the Beckett piece is a prodigious feat of memory and control as he recites, standing and motionless, the half-hour monologue. But his voice is nearly inaudible much of the time and thus meaning is lost, leaving us only with the very Beckettian image of an old man, standing next to a lamp in his nightshirt, murmuring. Not enough. A Piece of Monologue is, after all, a play, not a painting.

ZONE Through Sept. 17, Smoke, 233 N. Bread St., 215-413-1318 or www.livearts-fringe.org.