Better than: Your average mass fatality.

There ought to be something lethal at the heart of a rock show, some hurts-so-good death drive that reminds you how glorious it is to live, to breathe, to dance. Karen O's "psycho rock opera" Stop The Virgens—playing at St. Ann's Warehouse through the weekend—takes that fatal impulse seriously. By the piece's end, 40 blood-spattered bodies litter the stage, victims of a sudden and violent plague. Lock up your daughters; post-punk can kill.

This mass demise and its ensuing resurrection are the closest this stylish, vacant show comes to narrative, frustrating the expectations of audience members who took seriously the idea that it would have the dramatic heft of an opera. O and co-creator KK Barrett create a world part Brothers Grimm and part Henry Darger, with a dash of Village of the Damned, but they haven't borrowed any of the plots.

Photo via konoa.com

Before 66 Wooster Street became the Ohio Theatre and various apartments, it had a former life as a textile factory. Theatrical legend has it that before the first performance--in what was then called the Open Space--the cast and crew went down on hands and knees, armed with magnets, pulling decades of dropped pins and needles from the floorboard. Many years later, the Ohio is on pins and needles again. The building that houses the Ohio is being sold, and in a few weeks or months the Ohio Theatre will almost certainly cease to exist.

Robert Lyons, artistic director of Soho Think Tank, a nonprofit group that administers the Ohio and produces the OBIE-award winning Ice Factory Festival, describes the situation: "In one way or another, our days are numbered. It's just a matter of what that number is. We're trying to finish the season lined up through June. We could possibly still be here in the summer for Ice Factory '09. It could all end as soon as the end of January." While Lyons is currently in talks with the building's prospective buyer, he dismisses the idea that the Ohio will have any long-term future. "That doesn't seem like it's in the cards," he says. If the new owner allows the current season to finish up, audiences can bid farewell to the Ohio through its remaining scheduled shows, among them Target Margin's 10 Blocks on the Camino Real, Eisa Davis's Angela's Mix Tape (produced by New Georges), and Clubbed Thumb's annual Summer Works festival.