Tale of a dark secret

A rectangular, black box slides across a stage, pulled by an invisible force, then rises onto its side. A door opens, and a woman dressed in black tails steps out, followed by a parade of ghostly figures, stepping about jerkily like puppets on tangled strings.

“Come on along with the Black Rider,” the woman sings in a gravelly voice seamed with experience. “We’ll have a gay old time. Lay down in the web of the black spider. I’ll drink your blood like wine.”

As the eight-piece band finishes the slow, boozy riff, another ominous looking black-clad figure appears and barks out a warning and an enticement.

“The Devil’s Bargain is always a fool’s bargain, a bargain for rubes, dummies and chumps,” he says. “And there’s one born every minute. Step right up, Suckers and Suckees! It’s Hell under the shell, a left-handed deal with marked cards.”

So begins “The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets,” Robert Wilson’s acclaimed production, which begins its only U.S. engagement tonight at the American Conservatory Theater here. It then moves to Sydney, Australia.

This production -- a revival of the original 1991 German production and the first sung in English -- opened in June at the Barbican in London, where reviewers were wowed. An “extraordinary piece of musical theater,” the Telegraph said. “A remarkable achievement,” the Observer added.

“The Black Rider” certainly has a remarkable pedigree: a Weber opera re-imagined by director/designer Wilson and put to music by songwriter Tom Waits with text by late novelist William Burroughs, for whom the dark tale uncannily echoed his own tragedy.

“It has the look of a German Expressionist film,” Wilson observes in a phone interview.

That’s evident from the minute the devil steps out of the black box onto a stage lighted as stark and as bold as a Kirchner print. The devil, called Pegleg, is played by singer Marianne Faithfull, wearing a black wig and white pancake makeup.

Her mark is a despondent young clerk named Wilhelm (Broadway actor Matt McGrath), who wants to marry his beloved Kathchen (Mary Margaret O’Hara). But Kathchen’s woodsman father insists on giving his daughter away to a man who can hunt. Wilhelm couldn’t shoot himself in the foot.

“She cannot be his wife,” the father says. “Pen and gun don’t mix.... I must have a man who hunts, not a lily-handed pen grunt, whose bullets go astray.... Shooting is no child’s play.”

The devil offers Wilhelm a handful of magic bullets that always hit their mark. Wilhelm wins the hand of Kathchen -- but before the night is over he also fires a fatal shot.

“Wilhelm tries to change who he is, and he sells his soul to the devil,” McGrath says. “He pays a terrible price. You have to go on or you go mad in the face of tragedy.”

Even though the story ends in death and madness, the descendant is darkly funny, more slapstick and cartoonish than Greek tragedy. Wilson tried to stress the comedic elements of the story, he says, to underscore the essential catastrophe of the narrative.

“There’s a flatness in Burroughs’ voice that was easy for me as a director to try to get a lot of irony out of,” he says. “It has humor. All dark things must have humor or it’s not going to be very dark. A piece of black paper looks darker on a piece of white paper.”

It’s not surprising that Wilson speaks in art metaphors, as he originally studied to be a painter. (The Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco is showing an exhibition of Wilson’s drawings, including sketches from “The Black Rider.”) But it is as an auteur of avant-garde theater, with such works as “Einstein on the Beach,” that Wilson is best known -- especially in Europe where most of his expensive productions are mounted.

“The Black Rider,” for example, premiered in German at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater. The work, which was also staged in German in New York at BAM the following year, was the first part of a trilogy, which was followed by “Alice” and “Time Rocker.”

“I saw this piece 10 years ago in German,” ACT artistic director Carey Perloff says. “It was one of the single most thrilling pieces I have ever seen in the theater. It only made me sad it wasn’t in English and couldn’t be seen in America.”

The story comes from a German ghost tale that was made into an opera by Weber in 1821 called “Der Freischutz” (The Free Shooter).

“Weber changed the ending and made it happy,” Wilson says. “I went back. Everyone goes mad. I liked the original. I didn’t like the happy ending.”

Wilson says he had long wanted to work with Waits and thought the singer/songwriter might like the chance to recast the show in a more modern musical idiom. Wilson shared his stage sketches with Waits, who created an eclectic score mining Kurt Weill and the blues, with wry lyrics floating over haunting music made even more eerie by obscure instruments, such as a glass harmonica, Ondes Martenot and a musical saw.

For the text, Wilson approached Beat novelist William Burroughs, then in his 70s. The author of “The Naked Lunch” was an inspired choice to capture the tragedy of a man who kills what he most loves. In 1952, Burroughs put a drinking glass on the head of his common-law wife and fired a shot that missed the target and killed her.

“Burroughs said, ‘That’s perfect for me,’ ” Wilson recalls. “I encouraged him to be autobiographical. It is a very personal story.”

The woodsman father who stands in the way of the marriage, for example, turns out to be an oracle. “A gun is not for fun,” he warns in the first scene.

“Put down a pen, pick up a gun,” Wilhelm pouts. “Easy said, but not so done.”

“The bullet may have its own will,” the devil adds in Scene 4, “you never know whom it will kill. You think you’re taking aim? You do? It goes wrong anyhow. Someone like you, couldn’t hit a tethered cow!”

Wilson goes on to mimic Burroughs’ monotone, reciting some of his favorite lines. “That’s the way the needle sticks,” he drawls. “That’s the way the potato mashes.

“You can really hear Burroughs’ and Tom’s voice,” Wilson adds. “The great thing is the irony.”

Faithfull, it turns out, also knew Burroughs, who died in 1997. “He had a hard life,” she says. “More than his books, his letters refer to this. ‘The Black Rider’ is William’s real testament to how he felt about it. His answer is: ‘The devil made me do it.’ I believe him. Knowing William as a man and through his books and letters, I can just imagine the pain he was in.”

The singer says she used that insight to try to make the devil into a being who not only lures others into calamity but also knows longing and loss herself. “I wanted to give the devil a soul,” she says. “The devil is not a very nice character, but I wanted a moment when you can see into the devil’s heart.”

Although sympathy for the devil might come naturally to someone who once dated Mick Jagger, Wilson prefers visual tropes to musical ones when explaining what he has staged.

“I don’t try to dictate any impression,” he says. “It’s up to you what you see and hear. Look at it like a painting. You can just appreciate it for the experience you’re having. For the colors and the sound. I never try to dictate what the audience experiences.”