Maria Baranova

“Who made you write this?” asks their dominatrix-like supervisor. “An ugly spirit.” “What do you deserve?” “Punishment!” (It’s unclear whether the writing is the punishment or the offense.) The exchange goes on loop for 90 minutes, as audience members mill in and out.

This strange scene was part of BARDO, a pre-show “immersive experience” before David T. Little’s opera Black Lodge, part of this year’s Prototype Festival.

“Who,” or rather, what, “made you write this?” is a question that might have been posed to Little.

In his composer’s statement, Little says that Black Lodge started as an exploration of his perceived resonances between the work of Antonin Artaud (who came up with the “theater of cruelty”), William S. Burroughs (the writer best known for Naked Lunch), and David Lynch (the filmmaker behind Twin Peaks, who died yesterday). (None of these artists knew each other, though some overlap in time.)

But then Black Lodge “evolved into something much larger, deeper, and more personal,” writes Little, eventually being about “not just accepting” but “exploring” the “darker parts of myself.” Even by the end of the night, it was unclear what exactly that “darkness” was.

Both BARDO and Black Lodge take place in the Bardo, the liminal space between life and death. But this interpretation of the Bardo felt less Buddhist or mystical, and more like Dante’s Inferno or a haunted house. In other rooms of the BRIC Arts Center, done up to look like an escape room or BDSM dungeon, you could find:

1. One countertenor in a leather harness and ski mask.
2. Two gauze-wrapped nurses blowing giant bubbles.
3. Three witchy “demigods” who looked like they’d eaten too much activated charcoal, accompanied by the cloaked Isaura String Quartet playing mostly tremolos.
4. Jeffrey Damnit as the master of ceremonies, sporting Lynch’s silver faux-hawk, looking like a washed-up Elvis-meets-Beetlejuice.

BARDO’s cheap Spirit Halloween aesthetic did not match Black Lodge’s. If anything, it did a disservice to it. Because the film that supplemented Black Lodge, with a screenplay by Michael Joseph McQuilken, was nothing short of visually arresting, with a shot of the Isaura String Quartet playing in the snow.

Though it’s not explained in the program, Black Lodge appears to be primarily about Burroughs. What appears to be his character, “The Man,” is sung by tenor Timur Bekbosunov, accompanied by his heavy-metal band, Timur and the Dime Museum.

Doubled onscreen, in Burroughs’s signature grey suit, fedora, and glasses, Timur was looked as uncanny as he sounded, the Klaus Nomi influence especially evident in his high notes. (Indeed, the Dime Museum was formed as the result of a collaboration with Nomi songwriter Kristian Hoffman on America’s Got Talent.)

Maria Baranova

With a libretto by Beat poet Anne Waldman, Black Lodge felt like the ramblings of a lunatic, disjointed and nonlinear. One line in the libretto even alluded to Burroughs’s “cut up” technique: “All writing is in fact cut-ups, kid,” sings Timur, “Turn off the soundtrack and put on an arbitrary soundtrack, and it will seem to fit.”

This wasn’t the case for Little’s Black Lodge, whose music perfectly fit the action, as nothing else could. Onscreen, a blindfolded desert band played toy pianos, like something out of Dune. Sometimes the electric guitar, drum set, and organ synths drowned out the string quartet. But in moments when it was just the quartet, they sang. The combination of vocal fry with more operatic singing felt especially original.

In one scene, Timur is subjected to a surrealist game of operation, strapped to gurney and covered in wet clay, like a vessel or sarcophagus. “I’m the doctor here,” sings the writhing Timur, as a nurse reaches into the clay, and yanks out cords attached to small objects: a toy airplane, typewriter key, green apple, a severed ear.

Maria Baranova

In another scene, Timur cuts off his finger, which snaps like a piece of porcelain. This “sacred digit” becomes the bullet with which, under the influence of some sort of amber liquid in a glass bottle, Timur shoots his love interest, “The Woman,” with a cartoonish Roy Lichtenstein-like “Bang!” In the Bardo, he asks her “Will you forgive me?” to which she replies “No”

None of this makes any sense. Unless, of course, you know that Burroughs accidentally killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell (that’s when you shoot an apple off the other’s head), which he later said was because of an “Ugly Spirit.” Or that he self-amputated the top digit of left pinky finger (in an episode he calls his “Van Gogh kick”) because of a bad boyfriend breakup. (Burroughs was openly gay, something surprisingly unaddressed in Little’s opera.)

You might also recognize the ear from Lynch’s film Blue Velvet or the phrase “Black Lodge” from Twin Peaks. But unless you know all these references, Black Lodge is mostly impenetrable. And even if you know them, it feels like too many disparate influences. Without more streamlining or explanation, operagoers will leave Black Lodge saying, “What just happened?” Although maybe that’s just what Little wants.