Review: What to wear, Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon's Avant-Garde Beauty Pageant

There’s something oddly comforting—and by comforting, I really mean immensely disquieting, but in a way that’s kind of nice—about hearing the disembodied voice of Richard Foreman again. The singular, irreplaceable Foreman, founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, died a year ago at the age of 87; but his wild, irreverent, heady, terrifying, baffling body of work lives on through his disciples.

Three of them—Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater, and the composer Michael Gordon—have painstakingly resurrected Foreman and Gordon’s 2006 opera What to wear for its two-decades-later New York premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Not only is it clearly a passion project for all involved, but the care behind the endeavor is palpable. Care doesn’t make the thing any easier to explain, though.

How to describe What to wear? How to describe any Richard Foreman play? It takes place in a world completely alien to our own, but if you look hard enough—you may have to squint—you might start to pick up on jagged-edged shards of meaning.

“As of this moment, this ugly duckling is now effectively banished from the realm of the oh so beautiful people,” Foreman’s quaking, God-like recitation tells us as a massive duck head arrives on stage, only to immediately backtrack its way off. Ugliness has no place in the world of Madeline X (played by sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hal-Ting Chinn, tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, and guest artist St. Vincent), who spends the remaining 68 minutes living her beauty, interrogating her beauty, and finally realizing that her beauty, pardon the expression, is only skin deep.

Gordon’s music, as wholly itself as Foreman’s debris of text, is totally thrilling, played with bombastic verve by conductor Alan Pierson and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Garth MacAleavey’s sound design is especially excellent: we can feel the percussion deep within our chest, while still managing to understand complex lyrical passages like “When a duck enters a fine restaurant/Dressed very beautifully/That duck is eaten.” (In E.B. Brooks’s costumes, everyone is dressed very beautifully, and therefore eaten by all of us spectators.)

Producers Brooklyn Academy of Music and Beth Morrison Projects’s Prototype Festival have spared no expense in rebuilding Foreman’s original set, a model of which sits in the lobby of the Harvey Theater (you should absolutely check it out before heading inside the auditorium). His typical accoutrements are all there, from the plexiglass windows that effectively create a fourth wall to the taut wires to the blinding floodlights (the lighting is by Joe Levasseur). There are hundreds of props, massive murals by Foreman’s wife, Kate Manheim, and even a Dalek. I don’t envy technical supervisor Michael Darling, who had to recreate this haunted fun house from Foreman’s notebooks.

All in all, What to wear is classic Foreman, at once completely enigmatic and yet vivid in how he’s clearly calling all of us idiots for caring so desperately about how we look, and how the world looks at us. As for the duck, he just doesn’t want to be eaten in this duck-eat-duck world. “I am a duck who would prefer a roast beef sandwich to eat,” he sings. Wouldn’t we all?