For a company made up of a group of dedicated theater friends right out of college and only four seasons into its existence, Single Carrot Theater certainly has cataclysm and death on its collective brain. It not only inaugurated its Murder Ink reading, based on Anna Ditkoff’s weekly City Paper column, during its opening 2007-’08 season, it produced Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, a comically uneasy exploration of facing terminal illness. The company got down with some old-fashioned noir-y murder with 2008-’09’s Killer Joe, and then really plunged into pondering the inevitable in 2009-’10, with Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice reimagining, the Presynakov Brothers’ Playing Dead, and the Armageddon hysteria of Will Eno’s Tragedy: A Tragedy. This season hasn’t lightened the tone one bit, with both Goa Xing Jian’s The Other Shore and Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home approaching the unknowable from oblique angles. And now arrives this season’s concluding production, Andrew Irons’ Linus and Alora, in which the titular wife (Susannah Edwards) faces the return of terminal cancer by retreating into the comforting fantasy of her imagination in an effort to give her husband Linus (Nathan A. Cooper) the same sort of creative inner strength to deal with his imminent need to live his life without her.

The SCT troupe and its comrades, however, have also been one of the most creatively loose local companies of the past four years. Whether it be incorporating musical bits into an unsentimental holiday program written by a company member (Aldo Pantoja’s La Muñeca), diving headlong into a noted playwright’s intentional curveball (Sarah Kane’s Crave), abandoning words entirely for a dose of hybridized sci-fi fantasia (the collaborative Illuminoctum), or going for absolute metaphysical broke with the sensual immersion of The Other Shore, SCT has never been afraid to try something out just to see what happens. Inventive collaborations, incorporating other media, introducing movement theater/dance elements, puppetry (puppetry?), scores played by musicians in the play, fucking slam poetry? SCT says, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Under the direction of SCT’s Genevieve de Mahy (over its short existence the troupe has wisely rotated front and back of the house/organization duties), Linus is as much a multimedia experience as it is a dramatic one. Short films give visual life to Alora’s imaginative excursions; a trio—clarinetist/percussionist Madeline de Mahy, banjoist/guitarist Paul Diem, and percussionist/mandolinist Jeremy Durkin—provides musical interludes, and during some a Cuban couple (Melissa Wimbish and David Kellam) do something like a tango; and actors take turns climbing up one wall to a wall-mounted series of numbers, which begins to provide an abstract countdown to Alora’s inescapable final call.

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