I had no idea what I was in for. The Black Rider introduced me to the devil and his consorts, and then promptly tore me right in two.

On one hand, there is the unquestionably brilliant, artful execution of the set, lighting, and design. Flawless. Follow spots that augmented only a part or the whole of a costume with color, leaving the character's face untouched and emotive, white as a corpse's frozen alabaster smile, while the rest of their body glowed with real light. Creepy set pieces, seamless scene changes, and special atmospheric effects like creeping floor fog, and hanging mists that impossibly illuminated only half of a shaft of light. These effects invite the viewer on a first-hand tour of the underworld.

Then you have the performers themselves showing a range both vocally and in performance that is so broad, so technically challenging, my mouth hung quite open with awe. The quality and precision of the movement, the dancers, the singers, and a beautiful scene of lovers flying through the air, floating, singing...this is a sideshow of demons come to earth to pester us into thinking...what about I couldn't tell you, though. That part went mostly over my head. It might have had something to do with the fact that we sell our souls to Satan for love, and just before we get what we want, we decide consciously or subconsciously to murder it and damn ourselves to hell for all eternity for the sin of wanting.

There was that, and a bit about a goose.

If you see it, and know how they're related, I hope you'll fill me in.

On the other hand, there's the direction. And the story. Oh boy. I still can't figure out if the comments that follow are compliments or detractions. A bit of both, I guess. I suppose it's all a matter of perspective.

Borrowing salad-bar style from many theatrical traditions (vaudeville, shadowplay, farce, circus, puppetry, magic shows, burlesque theater, and especially kabuki), The Black Rider is more an ordeal than an ordinary theatrical performance, a challenge to you. Can you stay involved? What can you take away? After all the sound and fury, do you give one rat's ass if a pale writer who wants to be a hunter so he can win his lady's hand from her father is successful? That's the little story here, and it's lost.

Director Robert Wilson strikes me as a micromanager, the kind of director who is so precise, he strangles his actors with detail. The performers are so restricted in their limited movements, there were times I wanted to scream, 'Move your ass, girlie! Let's get on with it!' Known as a brilliant artistic design guy who's been all over the world designing operas and directing, and building buildings and everything else you can think of, Wilson's touch here seems quite heavy handed. No. Dictatorial. Giving these wraithlike characters some room to breathe, some room to move and behave, this might contribute to a slightly more human level of involvement on the part of an audience member.

The story itself...grrr. The Black Rider feels like what would happen if Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman smashed their brains together in a bowl, whipped them into a lathery foam with equal parts LSD, nitroglycerine, formaldehyde, and January molasses, poured them back into their craniums, and picked up a pen and wrote a story about love, loss and dealing with the Devil at the crossroads.

And so what, right? This is William S. Burroughs, after all. A pal of Kerouac and Ginsberg, a real roaming beat who missed out on one literary wave in the sixties to start his own in the mid-90's. This is the guy who wrote Naked Lunch, forcrineoutloud.

As selfish as it sounds, as an audience member, I wanted to be let in on the joke just a little bit. Burroughs' text is in places so remote, so unfathomable, I was motivated to roust myself from my seat and walk out that side door at the end of my row. (We lost about five percent of our viewing compatriots at the intermission muttering things like 'Rediculous' and 'I can't take it anymore'.) I felt, perhaps, like one of Shakespeare's groundlings watching the inaugural performance of The Tempest. As in, 'Cor, guvna! The bit with the book and the staff, top notch! And the daughter and the naked demon...triumphant! But wot's wif all the poems?' And perhaps I am just too much of a small-town rube to get what all the hubub's about. But I don't think so.

As to whether you should buy your own ticket to hell...I can only tell you this: think about the show you will see not as a performance, but an ordeal. The Black Rider exhilarated me. He pissed me off. He exhilarated me. He bored me to tears, in places. He made me and my date laugh, if only because we were poking fun at what we didn't understand in the action of the pastiche at hand. Unfortunately for Tom Waits, the advertised musical fable was left somewhere in the rehearsal hall, despite the rousting title tune, and the tender, melodic lilt of a great song called The Briar And The Rose.

Was it a positive experience?

Meeting the devil at the crossroads seldom is, but never mind that. Once you've shaken his hand, and seen his crooked smile, you'll never forget him either way.

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