The Devil's Disciples

By CHARLES MICHENER

Recipe for theatrical disaster: take a moldy 19th century German opera about a Faustian pact with the Devil and turn it over to a composer of hobo rock, a legendary writer from the Beat Generation, and a director who specializes in performance pieces for the art crowd. But don't go away. A pop opera of very odd sorts called The Black Rider is a triumph for its three collaborators, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson.

The ingredients of this marvelously unclassifiable entertainment, which is having a limited run ending this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, are a witches' brew of cabaret, silent-movie slapstick, Expressionist psychodrama, Japanese theater, lounge lizardry and high-tech wizardry. What keeps it bubbling is a melodic succession of wheezy parlor waltzes, barroom blues, moon-June pop and ersatz Kurt Weill. What gives it fizz is gallows humor, antiwar mockery, sweet sentiment and an inventiveness that more than honors the imperative laid down years ago by Sergei Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: "Astonish me!"

Postmodern directors have been shaking up grand opera for quite a while, especially in European cities like Hamburg, where this production was first unveiled in 1990. But rarely has opera received a shaking like this. The victim is Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz (The Free-Shooter). First performed in 1821, it was the granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn't an Ur-text but a pretext.

Their hero is Wilhelm, a hapless clerk whose trousers have a way of falling to his ankles just when they shouldn't. Their Devil is Pegleg, a swallow- tailed lowlife who learned his wiles behind the footlights of some sleazy Weimar cabaret, a la Joel Grey. They are surrounded by weirdos who make the Addams Family look like the Waltons. Among them: Wilhelm's inamorata, the robotically hysterical Kathchen; her fright-wigged father Bertram; an overbearing uncle who, in a hilarious non sequitur, tells the story of how Hemingway sold the movie rights to The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and a dead ancestor in Boris Karloff makeup whose only advice to the living is, "Do what thou wilt."

All this might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build a nest in your hair."

Burroughs delivers cheerless homilies with his usual gimlet-eyed glee: "You ever see a dog roll in carrion? Well now, a city boy see that and he might get tempted to join the dog . . ." The old hipster even indulges in a bit of moralizing, making a somewhat heavy-handed connection between the magic bullets and the temptation of drugs.

With The Black Rider, Wilson reveals that he is not only a high-minded mystifier but a real, low-down entertainer. In Wilson's theater, ideas are pictures. He lights his tableaux with hallucinatory intensity, populating them with actors, all in white makeup, who move with a combination of stiffness and grace. His performers enact archetypes rather than characters, using stylized gestures and movements out of his globe trotter's trunk. In the past, watching a Wilson event has sometimes been like finding yourself in a dream you want to -- but can't -- get out of. Here, given the fairy-tale story and nutty good humor, his somnambulistic style seems absolutely right.

He is wonderfully served by 12 actors (who mix German and English) from Hamburg's experimental Thalia Theater. As Kathchen, Annette Paulmann is truly incomparable: it's safe to say that nothing like her combination of sexuality and idiocy has ever been seen before. As Wilhelm, Stefan Kurt is equally good with both Buster Keaton looniness and the melodramatic pathos into which he collapses after losing his mind (and, again, his trousers). Nobody has ever made sliminess more winning than Dominique Horwitz as Pegleg. True to his show-biz heart, he doesn't disappear inside his 10-ft.-tall black coffin until he has sung some dreadful treacle about the last rose in his garden. After that, there can't be anyone in the house who isn't thinking that there's gotta be a way to keep this whatever-it-is together and take it on the road.