Opinionist: La Didone

Toward the end of La Didone, the latest multidisciplinary mash-up from the indefatigable Wooster Group, one vampire alien says to a captive astronaut, "Just let one of us join you. It will give you this wonderful new complexity." The line's an obvious metaphor for director Elizabeth LeCompte's conceit, a juxtaposition of the 17th century Italian opera Didone with kitschy 1965 sci-fi horror flick Planet of the Vampires. Yet, just as the alien's promise of "wonderful new complexity" is merely a ruse to latch onto another host body, LeCompte's spectacle feels like an elaborately empty shell, seeking a spirit to animate it. La Didone is more fussy than complex, and "wonder" isn't exactly what it's full of.

I do greatly admire The Wooster Group, and regret having missed all the legendary productions that came before my time (their first show, Spalding Grey's Sakonnet Point, premiered a month before I was born). But when I compare the recent pieces I loved (To You, the Birdie; Brace Up!; The Emperor Jones) with the ones that bored me (House/Lights, Hamlet, and now La Didone), The Wooster Group merely breaks even. To be sure, that's the high cost of taking bold risks, but $37.­50 is still a lot for some of us to pay when the experiment falls short. Which is not to say that the technically impressive La Didone is unfinished—since 2007, this meticulously-crafted production has successfully toured throughout Europe, where The Wooster Group is revered.

LeCompte concedes she's sometimes bored with her source material, and her tendency is to work her solipsistic obsessions to the max. When it succeeds, this auteur approach is exhilarating, but when her premise is flawed, the obsession becomes mere fetish. I'm sure she has her elaborate reasons for staging an opera about Dido and Aeneas simultaneously with a glorified Star Trek episode—for starters, the craft that's lost in outer space is essentially the same as a craft lost at sea in antiquity—but whatever the intellectual subtext, the effect is an impersonal, incomprehensible muddle. (And in Italian, with bifurcated surtitles!) I know I probably sound like John Simon here, but what's so frustrating is that the very thing that makes The Wooster Group vital after all these years—the company's insanely talented core group of performers: Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd, and Ari Fliakos—is obscured in La Didone behind LeCompte's monomaniacal concept, exacerbated here by an imbalanced sound design that favors the ringer opera singers over the brilliant actors.

The whole evening unfolds like a Hollywood parody of a sophisticated urban audience knowingly indulging a supposedly revolutionary opera interpretation. Only in real life, there is no Adam Sandler in the house to unleash a deafening belch and pop the pretentious hype balloon. Unless I'm the Adam Sandler in that analogy... So if it saves you your $37.50, perhaps you'll pardon my boorishness.