The Brooklyn Rail

There was no straight line to walk in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Strong lobby. Stuffed and expectant, audiences queued at the bar, huddled around a displayed scenic model, and made serpentine lines out of restrooms. If you frequent experimental venues, you might have just gained momentum, on the way to your assigned vom, before seeing someone you know and stopping to say hi. Opening at the midpoint of festival month, a Richard Foreman show is essentially January’s Christmas.

Remounted through BAM and Prototype by Beth Morrison Projects twenty years after its debut, What to Wear is Foreman and Michael Gordon’s perplexing opera (directed by Foreman) about Madeline X, a person (symbol?) who—well, it’s hard to go any further without dipping into interpretation. Even to call the piece an opera is merely an approximation: it’s a post-rock, vibrato-free one that is indeed sung-through, but to pin a single genre on the piece flattens its rangy imagination and timeless social critique.

Plotless but vibey, What to Wear revolves around themes of consumerism, vanity, and the metaphorical temptation of a well-cooked duck. It was easy to get lost, but Foreman’s booming baritone, in various voiceovers, helped punctuate scenes. (His confounding lighting did not—occasionally, lights turned off in the middle of a scene, or even a sung note, but rose a second later; roasting a duck that befits BAM’s Harvey Theater takes a lot of wattage.)

Foreman’s voice opened What to Wear: “As of this moment, this ugly duckling is now effectively banished from the realm of the oh so beautiful people.”

That duckling was a large globular head, a puppet who resurfaced throughout the show. Maybe the duck was Madeline X; maybe the eighteen performers are each figments of Madeline X. “Experts are confused by Madeline X,” Foreman’s voice said. The audience, indeed confused, giggled.

Opaque, What to Wear is meant to wash over the audience with its echoing waves of Gertrude Steinian text. Reviewing the original production for the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed wrote, “So what is What to Wear? I’m doing my best not to tell you, because this is music theater for the unprepared, a theater that you discover while you look, listen and wonder.”

And there was much to wonder at. The performers introduced themselves—“This is Madeline X / in a terrible world / one unpleasant world / such a bad, bad world”—against Foreman’s Picasso-esque backdrop of distressed, misshapen figures while wearing E.B. Brooks’s spectacular costumes.

A quartet of principal vocalists (Sarah Frei, who reprises her role from the opera’s premiere, and Hai-Ting Chinn, Sophie Delphis, and Morgan Mastrangelo) wore camel-brown robes that shimmered and swayed. Contrasting them, another larger chorus wore darker plaid skirts of a rougher material that sat high, like an Empire waist, attached via mahogany harnesses that evoked underground deviance. Both factions had, in periwinkle and turquoise, pingpong-sized balls atop their heads like bits of brains. The plaid-wearers had more.

Here, Brooks’s costumes illustrated a dichotomy of fantastical class, taste, and intellect. Foreman’s voice returned: “Madeline X lives in a world of lies.” The shining quartet responded, “All objects are beautiful in such a world.” The ensemble had a response of their own: “Lies, lies, lies.”

A harsher line was drawn, dividing “consumers” from what your Republican uncle might call “complainers.”

But even complainers consume: things are beautiful, and it’s fun to purchase them. What to Wear—the title alone a directive, or question, about the superficially sartorial—is as much an opera as a parade of stuff. The hundreds of props that came on and off the stage included sparkling boxes and ginormous dice and golf clubs larger than Tiger Woods. And—yes—a plated duck. It’s all garish, but so are the painstakingly curated marketing photos seen on Instagram that take weeks to execute for scrolling eyes to devour in seconds.

Madeline X—perhaps the X is like the mathematical variable, an undefined being that could stand for you or me—may not want to live in a world where beauty is measured, wielded, and commodified. Tough titties. Even the performers moved like toy soldiers, ready for the buying. Go on a spree. You can eat the rich and eat the rich duck, it won’t kill you. But, ugh, the mental gymnastics to justify even a single, indulgent purchase.

“Look inside her mind,” the chorus sang. Multiple performers held that “look,” a whole note, on different pitches, creating a quarrelsome chord. It was uncomfortable to hear and musicalized the competing voices inside our heads that bend over backwards to justify our actions: how to live in a cruel world kindly.

That world is familiar. Our world has slow fashion, but sales! Veganism, but duck! (Gordon, the composer, admitted in a program note he was “confused by the text” but Foreman gave him free rein to interpret it as long as he promised to “keep the duck.”) Foreman was curious about how to live in a resource-destroying world. It is worth considering, decades after What to Wear’s premiere, who still has the resources to ask these questions on a Foremanian scale.

“Nothing changes,” the chorus rang in the piece’s final stanza. And yet, the arts funding in Foreman’s day may seem Midas-like compared to 2026. In that case, times have gotten worse.

They’ve also diversified. The creatives at the helm of this production—Alan Pierson (music direction) and Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson (creative direction)—are all white artists north of age fifty. With a documentarian’s eye, they have meticulously resurrected Foreman’s production—and their youth. They represent experimental theater’s old guard, one that blossomed last century, expanded the places where artists can create, and largely empowered white men.

This remount of What to Wear is a shrine, but hopefully more than a time capsule. The January 15 performance, the piece’s opening night, was packed. Foreman will do that. It is also imperative that resources for large casts not be exclusive to dead artists with name recognition.

The experimental venues established by generations past are struggling or have evaporated, and a separate article should take stock and eulogize. Consistent incubators that young, interdisciplinary artists can affordably access to cut their teeth—The Tank, The Brick, Pageant, Triskelion Arts, JACK, Dixon Place—have become populated oases. This may be as much because of high interest as it is minimal competition, to use an aggressive term: these spaces have too few peers and host many artists.

As a result, their shows are selling out. Under the Radar Festival artists are encouraging audiences to join the waitlist, and Exponential Festival has expanded its footprint, presenting across nine Brooklyn venues this month. Even so, ticket sales only cover a percentage of an operating budget, not that artists are thinking minimally: Time Signatures, through Exponential, features a cast of nine, and 12 Last Songs, through Under the Radar, was to have a thirteen-person team, but US Citizenship and Immigration Services did not approve ten of their visas, leading to that show’s cancellation the week of its US premiere.

It was a painful week. It’s been a painful January. Maybe some in the audience at What to Wear felt it; what started as a festive entrance turned into a hostile exit. Perhaps unprepared for the madcap performance, some wanted out. Just as bows began, a woman stood up to leave and picked up her bag, turning one way and then the other. She bonked the head of the older woman in front of her, twice, who turned around, pissed, to tell the woman what she’d done. No apology followed. A little farther back, someone mid-row tried beelining out during bows but evidently tripped on his neighbor’s belongings. The show was seventy minutes long; spiteful words were exchanged.

“You people do not shine,” the chorus sang, Foreman reaching forward in time to remind audiences how tricky it is to dress nice and stay kind in an ugly, mean world.

As What to Wear went on, the music became more militant, more ostentatious, more trance-inducing. More people, and items, flooded the stage. “Am I still beautiful?” the chorus later asked.

That “still” holds two decades of changing audiences, venues, and artmaking. It is also a call for today’s theatermakers to imagine their own place in a long lineage of experimentation. What works will be re-revealed twenty years from now? What can the word “still” hold now, and then?