STAGE REVIEW : Robert Wilson Tackles ‘Dr. Faustus’

“Robert Wilson is Funny!” trumpets the brochure for Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival with the cocky insistence of an old Hollywood trailer that promises “Garbo Laughs!”

If you are among those who feel that truth in advertising is implicitly oxymoronic, you will not be surprised to hear that Wilson’s latest Zen extravaganza has but one good laugh. In the best Madison Avenue spirit of the cheap tease, I will save it for last.

There is a Garbo-esque echo to the closing words of “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” adapted from a play by that Groucho Marx of the French salons, Gertrude Stein. The line, “Leave me alone,” is Doctor Faustus’ final request as he psyches himself up to go to Hell, having sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to produce light.

Everything echoes and repeats in Robert Wilson’s mirror-image production from Berlin’s Hebbel Theater, in which three actors portray Doctor Faustus, two play Mephisto (one in black, one in red) and three play a woman named Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. Our lady of the endless name gets bitten by a snake, in the person of a man wielding a long pointy baton named Mr. Viper. Prominent among the other allegorical figures who come and go are a Little Boy dressed in white knee pants, a Dog (a woman in a man’s suit) who says “Thank you” with exasperating frequency and a Country Woman (a man in a wig, white dress and platform shoes) wielding a sickle who looks like Death and presumably is.

One might infer that Faustus is a stand-in for none other than Robert Wilson, the ultimate control-freak of a theatrical form that enslaves the actor to the almighty light bulb. From the vertical shaft of white light that opens the show to a flurry of glass bulbs that signal the consummation of Dr. Faustus’ powers, light is the dominant visual leitmotif.

Although 15 fetching young actors appear in “Doctor Faustus,” the real star is a long fluorescent light strip that rises, falls and angles to serve as a chair, table, bed and everything else but the kitchen sink. As it slices the otherwise naked stage into geometric segments, it becomes a a juiced-up version of the long light bar that tilted oh-so-slowly in Wilson’s mesmerizing “Einstein on the Beach.”

Indeed, almost everything about “Doctor Faustus” is more kinetic than Wilson’s usual stretch-it-till-it-breaks brand of pictorial staging. The music by Hans Peter Kuhn, perhaps the best thing about the relatively brief evening (it clocks in under two hours), is varied and playful, a refreshing break from Wilson’s yammering former collaborator, Philip Glass. The score bubbles with insinuating honky-tonk motifs, jaunty little nursery rhyme melodies and a cacophonous burst of percussive sounds: breaking glass, exploding guns, slamming doors, screeching car wheels. Even the robotic gestures characteristic of the director’s hyperstylized movement are imbued with a new lightness, epitomized by Matthias Bundschuh’s Little Boy, hopping along on the balls of his feet with a blithe disregard for gravity.

None of this surface vivacity, however, saves “Doctor Faustus” from an overwhelming cloud of tedium and silliness. Much of the evening’s irritation is endemic to Gertrude Stein’s circular sentences, coiling back on themselves with a probing, belligerent naivete that stirs up your aggressive impulses; before the evening is over you’ll want to hit something. “I will kill, I will, I will . . . Do I know it very well or do I not know it very well? . . . She’s there. Why there? Yes there . . . I could begin to cry but why could I begin to cry?” Why a duck? Why no chicken? Where’s the chicken? Kill the chicken.

The Dr. Seuss-like boxiness of Stein’s verses is reinforced by the removed German-inflected readings of the young Hebbel actors, most of whom have just learned English for this production. The simplicity and repetition is ostensibly intended to reinforce the mythic underpinnings of the tale, but the effect is as if the possessed schoolchildren in that old sci-fi movie “Village of the Damned” were improvising a play in front of their living room drapes called “Dick and Jane Do Major Drugs.”

The young German actors, theater students from the former German Democratic Republic, are all distinctive, agile and appealing, including Martin Vogel as the lady in platform shoes and Karla Trippel as the ever-grateful dog. Trippel gets the evening’s one solid laugh, albeit unintentionally, as she attempts to emulate a dog barking in English with heavy Teutonic influences: “Voof!” It’s a nutty comment on the whole evening, which is so awash in formal German-expressionist mannerism as to suggest that the Texas-born Robert Wilson, in his long hiatus abroad, has finally, entirely and irrevocably, reinvented his heritage. Ven in Rome . . .