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Devil takes a ride By Robert Avila LEAVE IT TO Marianne Faithfull to elicit sympathy for the devil. A veteran actor and real-life legend of the Faustian world of rock 'n' roll, Pegleg, her peg-legged devil (also known as the Black Rider), is coyly reserved but imbued with warmth – possible hellfire – in her knowing glances. She sings to her audience, courts it, with good-humored irony and understated world-weary charm. Rock stars know you'll never get anywhere without the devil. Whether or not American Conservatory Theater made a deal with Mr. D to get it, they have the U.S. premiere of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, a revival of the fairy-tale first produced in German in 1990 by avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson, composer-lyricist Tom Waits, and beat writer William S. Burroughs, up and running in its only North American engagement, at the Geary Theater. The story draws on various versions of a folktale that inspired more than one foundational work of German romanticism, including Carl Maria von Weber's famous 1821 opera, Der Freischütz. The piece takes the form of an homage to German expressionism – with its exaggerated lines and gestures, its penchant for the grotesque, its rebellious energy – and concerns a young clerk named Wilhelm (Matt McGrath) who falls in love with Käthchen (Mary Margaret O'Hara), the daughter of a woodsman (Dean Robinson). Wilhelm's ineptitude with a rifle puts him well outside his would-be father-in-law's consideration. So he makes a bargain with the devil, obtaining magic bullets guaranteed to make him a first-rate marksman and impress the old man. This he does. But the devil always extracts his due: his last magic bullet has "a will of its own," which makes its way to his new bride, killing her and driving the grief-stricken groom into the ranks of the devil's demented entourage. Matt McGrath – with the apt-sounding experience on Broadway as the MC in Cabaret and in the title role of off-Broadway's Hedwig and the Angry Inch – makes a compelling expressionist hero. Agile and precise, with vocal chops to match, he manages to infuse the deliberately artificial restraints and exaggerations Wilson places on his character with colors of psychic longing and duress, like a haunted marionette. Wilson's renowned gifts as a designer, as well as his distinctly unconventional approach to theatrical space and time, produce lavish and startlingly beautiful scenic compositions. In The Black Rider lovers float through blue ether; a white neon outline of a gun suspended in the air gently settles to Earth; a towering forest of trees shrinks to knee-high in the blink of an eye; a bird woman emitting high-pitched caws travels across the stage in slow motion, fluttering her hands like wings once or twice; demons and damned souls with crazy, robotic walks wear exaggerated expressions on their faces; phrases and lines are repeated, stuttered, echoed; short acts before the curtain between scenes feature one or two characters pantomiming some incomprehensible struggle, or babbling in various voices some giddy, sardonic dialogue that might be a meta-narrative to the larger story. The devil warns, in Burrough's sly, often hysterically funny lingo, "The bullet may have its own will. You never know who it will kill." And "the first one's always free." Silver bullets "shine just like a spoon." (A junkie's spoon?) "The spoon will have his dish," Pegleg declares. (A junkie's spoon!) "Just like marijuana leads to heroin ... you're hooked – heavy as lead." "My hand reaches for the bullet like a junkie reaching for his stash," Wilhelm says, and the metaphor runs deep: the needle, the gun. Man shoots himself and the thing he loves. Myth blurs into biography. Burroughs (who famously became a writer after shooting his wife in a game of William Tell in 1951) knows about bargains with the devil. An American Faust. Juxtaposing the euphoric and the macabre, Waits's stirringly luminescent lines, "In the morning when I rise," are sung as a veil as black as night drops over the face of the bride. Wilson's evocative, exacting choreography continues his experiments with time and space, while playing on expressionism's jagged amplifications of line and gesture. The actors' blending of this self-conscious artificiality with a Halloween-like revelry, and something of glam rock's ironic sentimentalism, feels like a highbrow Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is maybe to suggest that The Black Rider is limited by its own success. Rooting itself in a basically linear narrative, and unfolding in a conventional running time of two and a half hours, it makes it an unusually "accessible" example of Wilson's work – and Burroughs's, for that matter. While the freedom found and exploited within these more traditional dramatic constraints is considerable, it comes at the cost of the kind of theatrical space that Wilson's less linear, less bounded, more anti-narrative pieces open up to the spectator. Some may long for such wide-open spaces more than others. The Black Rider is a rich theatrical experience. And what's particularly striking about its vibrant, madcap, exquisitely composed musical theater is the roughly equal power it harnesses from Wilson, Waits, and Burroughs. Masters in their turn of a wry American vernacular, they each seem to find perfect freedom of expression within the established framework, while together infusing a Faustian folktale from the forests of Germany with a seamless mixture of history, myth, archetype, and biography. Their distinctly American idiom only enlarges the common ground before them: the Faustian tension between human will and a horrendous, maddening fate. 'The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets' runs through Oct. 3. Wed/8-Sat/11, Sept. 14-18, 21-25, 28-30, and Oct. 1-2, 8 p.m. (also Wed/8, Sat/11, Sept. 15, 18, 25, 29, and Oct. 2, 2 p.m.); Sun, 2 p.m. (Oct. 3, show at 7 p.m.), Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $20-$80. (415) 749-2228; www.act-sf.org. |
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