The heat inside the holiest place on 42nd and Spruce streets — St. Andrew's Chapel, or "the Cathedral" — is thicker than the layers of subtext splayed forth by the artists at work within its 70-foot-high ceilings.

Despite its de-sanctified state (it's no longer a functioning church), the chapel's sacredness is intact. From cracked gold leafing to divine light shafts, the elegant tatter is a delicious playing field for a study of the people who tried to identify a Garden of Eden between two rivers. For on this day, in this place, we are here to examine paradise lost, waiting to watch the first run-through of Planetary Enzyme Blues, New Paradise Laboratories' most surprisingly linear, most shockingly quiet project — one that looks at the Philadelphia of progressive thought as reborn in the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s.

The city as an Edenic enterprise — a navel-gazing utopian society whose progressive ideals were forged throughout Philadelphia history by William Penn and John Bartram, by Johannes Kelpius and Ira Einhorn, by Quakers and hippies, from the building of the Eastern State Penitentiary and the Waterworks through to the creation of Earth Day.

"We have to own that — that the City of Brotherly Love was a proposal for what could be, for the whole world," says Whit MacLaughlin, NPL's artistic director, about Enyzme's roots. "It wasn't just a slogan. The idea of Philadelphia came from the Bible. This was the first birthplace of our nation. There truly is no more important city in this country in terms of the archaeology of [the] democratic idea."

This subject has piqued MacLaughlin's interest since he arrived here from Virginia in late 1997, starting up the Philadelphia branch of the NPL cult by 1998. "Rrose was kindaaaa about the utopian vibe of the founding of the city," says MacLaughlin. He's talking about 2003's Live Arts offering, Rrose Selavy Takes a Lover in Philadelphia, the first of a "Civics Lessons" trilogy MacLaughlin conceived to test Philadelphia's utopian timeline, while the cosmic company's most ecstatic pieces — This Mansion Is a Hole: Hugh Hefner Throws a Party at the Center of the Universe — are, to paraphrase Brian Wilson, physical, cerebral symphonies to God.

into the mystic: Jeb Kreager and Mary McCool play disillusioned youth. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"But this one is more about how the failure of that founding became fun again. Fun is even part of our subtitle — Fun Is Dead. Long Live Fun — despite the fact that the '60s and early '70s weren't always Philly's shining hour."

Like a commune unto itself — its self-taught language of subtle movements and flailings standing in for complex theories — Lee Etzold, Jeb Kreager, Mary McCool, Aaron Mumaw, Matt Saunders and McKenna Kerrigan have created archetypes of '60s sorts. As framed by MacLaughlin and dramaturge Larry Loebell, each member takes to his or her A-type with loose but thorough grace: Etzold, the oversexed love child; Kreager, the overstuffed hippie; Mumaw, the investigatory intellectual; McCool, the freakflag-flying, child-bearing babymama; Kerrigan, the earth mother superior; Saunders, the damaged war vet. Each company member has his or her own distinct, soulfully sexy look. Each is distinctively fuckable. Each, whether standing still and quiet or pickling each word with soft tartness and giddy wiggles, has found his actor's groove after nine years in the NPL trenches, always meeting in an orgy of leg-humping and gyrating. Without telling you much more about staging or costumes or dialogue (and I can't — MacLaughlin made me promise) Enzyme is their most silent, conventional, nearly literal piece, far from the frantic abstraction of Stupor or Don Juan in Nirvana.

They reference all kinds of things. Easy Rider. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Barbarella. They smoke joints. Mock ménage • trois. Play with guns. Sing Steppenwolf.

The smell of music coming off the stone of a church — an echo-plexed sample of a Paul Kantner guitar line from a Jefferson Airplane song — is beautifully musty, reverberating through the room like moist sonic mold, linking you to that world. "The airwaves then were one riff," says MacLaughlin. The pirated voice of Richard Nixon announcing the ceasefires in Vietnam on Jan. 15, 1973. The imitations of Frank Rizzo screamed from the mezzanine. The dangerous but humorous locution of psilocybin at work. All are part of MacLaughlin's usual collage of celestial alchemy.

From the rafters, these sound clips drive the myth of the '60s in which Enzyme takes place — a moment meant to spiritually reinvent the failed democracy Philadelphia was designed to be. Suddenly, there's a clatter from behind. It's Etzold, who's bringing up, from the basement, several of the 50 tin cans of government-issue crackers marked "February 1963" and dozens of barrels of water. These holy and absurd elements are immediately incorporated into Enzyme's staging — a round, illuminated tent, red wagons, a makeshift radio tower, several plastic babies, dozens of mini Liberty Bells, thousands of Super Balls.

"We were reinvesting in democracy, reinventing it," says MacLaughlin of Philly's '60s, reaching backwards to head forwards into the philosophy of Kelpius, the 17th-century Rosicrucian who brought his teaching from Germany to London (to meet Jane Leade, the head of the Philadelphians) and from there to a caved area along the Wissahickon so that he and his communal tribe could wait out the End of Days. Before Kelpius, there was the third chapter of the Book of Revelation, which spoke of Philadelphia as a place that would be spared from the hour of trial. God, not the Devil, has been in the details on the local tip. That is the true Philadelphia Story.

"The city of Philly is a mythological beast," says MacLaughlin. "Its whole founding — the Quakers, William Penn — was based on the hopes of a second coming, a second millennium." This incredible history of progressive thinking — Philadelphia's legacy was all for the taking. That is until, in both MacLaughlin's eyes and those of Loebell, it blew up in our face. "The failure of the Penitentiary's Quaker penal culture of isolationism that drove prisoners insane, the Waterworks' fresh-fluid system that delivered cholera instead, this intense visionary ideation combined with horrible shoot-yourself-in-the foot tragedy: That's Philly's spiritual history," says MacLaughlin.

So is Ira Einhorn. It is through the self-styled, self-promoting guru and Earth Day co-founder (and murderer, don't forget that) — who used the phrase "planetary enzyme" as a metaphor for himself — that NPL's Enzyme got its title. "What a goofy, wonderful thing to call yourself," says MacLaughlin, giggling. "Philly is sort of an enzyme, officiating a lot of connections in the United States. I think we have amnesia about that."

After writing the script for a documentary on Eastern State Penitentiary, Loebell became something of an amateur postcolonial historian. With that historicity and his pure city pedigree ("I live 20 blocks from where I grew up"), he became a perfect tour guide to progressive Philadelphia, literally and figuratively guiding NPL through trips to Kelpius' Caves, Bartram Gardens, Waterworks sheds and the Penitentiary.

"As a playwright, I start with an idea, write a linear story with characters that say things to each other that cause things to happen," says Loebell. "Not NPL. They don't start with a story or text, they start with an idea. … In fact, they start backwards [and] just do this physical piece, and impose a story onto the actual physical work. The story is not a propelling engine."

And since NPL doesn't make policy statements, Enzyme is a phantasmagorical peek into '60s rhetoric as viewed through what modern youth might have been then. Says MacLaughlin: "Larry and I are in our 50s. But the cast? They're in their 20s and 30s. They had to imagine that legacy, one that sought to eliminate war, in the same way that era's teens had to imagine the legacy of Kelpius and beyond."

"NPL was meant to be about utopian ideas — a life inside a courted zone," he continues. "Life as we'd like it to be." Fueled by their usual hunger to swallow whole the big mythology by plunging into the jugular of pop culture, NPL dives into a timeline inside of and out of the past, present and future with more realism, subtlety and wistful tenderness than before.

Mention to McLaughlin that Enzyme is their least abstract work and he smiles. "You're right. Philly is damaged spiritually — in a beautiful, soulful way. And that's reflected in a softer piece. Enzyme is about Philly forgiving itself for any youthful indiscretion — for the Penitentiary, for Einhorn's fuck-ups, for all the baby-booming wrongs that made us into conservatives."

Planetary Enzyme Blues, Sept. 1, 8 p.m.; Sept. 2-4, Sept. 7-11, Sept. 13-17, 9 p.m.; $20, The Cathedral (St. Andrew's Chapel), 4201 Spruce St., 70 min.