Theater Review: Baryshnikov, Dafoe Delight In Robert Wilson’s'the Old Woman’

A curious exhilaration turns contagious when Willem Dafoe trips the light fantastic with Mikhail Baryshnikov in “The Old Woman,” and that’s only part of the artfully eccentric delights in the Robert Wilson creation playing through Sunday, Nov. 23, at Cal Performances. Baryshnikov and Dafoe trade parts, with blissfully confounding alacrity, as one or another — or both at once — plays the main character, a writer, and the old woman of the title, a young woman he picks up at a bakery or a male friend of the writer. A collaboration between Wilson’s Watermill Center, Baryshnikov Productions and Change Performing Arts, “Woman” is adapted from an obscure absurdist novella of the same title by the deliberately little-known Soviet avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms (whose obscurity wasn’t enough to keep him from dying in a gulag at 36). In the shards of vignettes that follow, the writer picks up a young woman and realizes he can’t take her home with that corpse in the place, comes home to find the old woman crawling about, has a nightmare about killing her and finally packs her in a suitcase to get rid of her. In Wilson’s version, that circuitous story becomes a vision in black-and-white — as in the stage curtain, which looks like an odd 19th century magazine illustration of a rural scene, festooned with satirically demonic cartoon annotations — but one studded with brilliant, often astonishing accents in bright primary colors. The pattern seems to radiate out from the stark white expressionist-kabuki-makeup (with slashes of bright red) of the performers, dressed almost identically in black suits with white shirts and red ties (Dafoe is the one with a bow tie). Dafoe, a founding and longtime member of the pioneering experimental Wooster Group, is a past master at this kind of pastiche but seems, if anything, to be taking it to impressive new levels. Baryshnikov slips into the mode with a dancerly poise and modest demeanor that makes his outbursts all the more expressive and his depiction of the young woman strangely touching. Actions and line readings are so stylized and varied — with Dafoe at times rattling off the same line in a rapid succession of accents and genres — that occasional naturalistic deliveries land with the force of a surrealistic flourish. Many forms of dance, as Hal Willner’s score slips from original passages to samples of everything from a jazzy “Tiger Rag” (Hold that tiger) and some gut-bucket blues to “Good Night Sweetheart,” Randy Newman’s “I’ll Be Home” and a violin piece by modern minimalist Arvo Pärt.