Quartett

“Isabelle Huppert is cold and hot,” writes Robert Wilson in a brief program note for Quartett. “Isabelle Huppert is cerebral and intuitive. She is small and large.” This marvelous little formulation at least gives the audience a fun parlor game to play on the way home from an otherwise unsatisfying night at BAM. Isabelle Huppert is slender and obese. Isabelle Huppert is profligate and thrifty. She is paper and plastic. She is Isabelle Huppert and she is Hisabelle Uppert. Try it at home!

It is a testament to Huppert’s enormous (and tiny!) talent that she gives a fascinating performance in a production that otherwise teeters on camp. In Heiner Müller’s venomous deconstruction of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Huppert plays the wily Merteuil opposite Ariel Garcia Valdès’s Kabuki devil of a Valmont; their dozen pages of dialogue (translated from German into French) are stretched into 90 minutes by the addition of loud sound effects and striking pools of colored light. When Huppert speaks, often repeating her lines over and over—is she rehearsing them to perfection, or grinding them to nonsense?—she is riveting. But she is surrounded by portentous silliness: At times the actors stick out their tongues like reptiles, because, you see, the characters are cold-blooded; Michael Galasso’s score bangs out arpeggios as three nonspeaking performers strike dancey poses, sometimes pantless, sometimes wearing—gasp!—a single high-heeled shoe. When the piece isn’t obsessing about death, it is delving into erotics, but Wilson’s frigid aesthetic makes the enterprise about as sexy as a Popsicle. Honed by the director’s exacting style, Quartett is sharp and dull.—Adam Feldman

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