The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Park Avenue Armory

Dec. 17-21

New York

A successful memoir depends on the synergy of compelling raw material and the artistry of the teller, but Robert Wilson's "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović," a traveling production that opened last week at the Park Avenue Armory, brings out the worst aspects of both. The combination of Ms. Abramović, a performance artist known for long duration pieces (in "The Artist Is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, she sat motionless for hours), and Mr. Wilson, a pioneer of cryptic, image-based, slow-motion theater (" Einstein on the Beach" lasts 41/2 hours), is weird and finally tedious. The content is repellent, and the artistry doesn't amaze.

The first part of the piece plumbs Ms. Abramović's terrible childhood—battling parents, abusive mother—in a tone that is alternately deadpan, gleeful and sentimental. The second part, which has even less bite, is about the joys and (mostly) trials of her main romantic relationship. The actor Willem Dafoe, ensconced among file boxes at the side of the stage, is the storyteller, while Mr. Wilson's actor/dancers create processions and tableaux that are representative or not: Marina gets stuck in the washing machine, Marina's mother throws a crystal ashtray at her head, Marina spends a year in the hospital, Marina's parents fight, Marina plays Russian roulette. Everyone wears white clown makeup. The narration speeds along in short sentences, sometimes repeating or going in reverse: "1973: Burning her hair." "2009: Her heart is broken. Psychoanalysis." For most of the first section, Ms. Abramović plays her mother, an ominous, black-gowned figure with a Joan Crawford grin and a penetrating shriek; later, she plays herself.

The music is so amplified and mixed that although there are four live players in the pit, the instrumentals all feel electronic. Three musical genres overlap. The compositions of William Basinski, which repeat brief melodic figures in endless loops (like Philip Glass, another Wilson collaborator, but without the rhythmic drive), segue into the ululations of Svetlana Spajić and her four-voice ensemble. Their Serbian folk-inflected, straight-tone numbers, no doubt intended to evoke the heritage of Ms. Abramović, who was born in Belgrade, have more grit. Then there is Antony, a transgender singer and composer, who also wears a long black gown and sings croony, moony songs with few notes and little textual or textural variety.

Occasionally, the elements come together with a trancelike intensity. "The Story of the Shoe Polish," for example, in which Marina paints her room with shoe polish, which, because it looks and smells like excrement, keeps her mother out, is told in layers—with Mr. Dafoe minutely describing actions like sitting, drinking and urinating; Antony hissing the ballad "I am seething"; and eight Marina avatars dragging lines of miniature beds, like pull toys, onto the stage. The scene concludes with shrieks from Marina's mother, which make all the Marinas run and hide. Perhaps it is making a point about Ms. Abramović's artistic obsession with the body and minutiae as a psychological way to control her environment under abusive circumstances. Or perhaps not.

But the vignettes and the chatter continue endlessly, for two hours and 40 minutes, and the viewer's sense of detachment from the material grows. Finally, the images stop being curious and are just peculiar. Why, for example, is Antony holding a lobster on a leash? Why is there a man carrying an enormous snake? We've seen these kinds of Wilsonian pictures before. They're not magical, and the alternation of morbid glee and soupy sentiment undermines any connection we might feel with Marina. In the end, it left me stupefied and convinced that these artists were a lot less interesting than they think they are.

***

The Salzburg Marionette Theatre's production of Wagner's "Ring," presented at the Metropolitan Museum last weekend, is clever, but it suffers from the fact that without the music, the cycle is just a goofy story. The two-hour distillation of the four operas hits the major plot points but doesn't tell us why we should care. It does use the music—the renowned Georg Solti Decca recording (1958-1964)—but sparingly, with brief snippets of vocal parts and slightly longer stretches of instrumental material.

Two actor-narrators, Tim Oberliessen and Yoann Moess, tell the story, voice the characters, and even venture onto the stage to play the giants Fafner and Fasolt, as well as Gunther, Gutrune and Hunding. They keep it light, stress the absurdities of the libretto, and even add a little tongue-in-cheek political commentary and feminist criticism. (Of Alberich's encounter with the Rhinemaidens, Ms. Moess remarked: "Small men with big egos have caused a lot of trouble in the world.") The production design gives the nod to contemporary European style, though not at its most extreme. The period is the 1950s, with a Cadillac for the gods, a motorcycle for Siegmund, and a trailer home for Mime. Frei and Brünnhilde are done up like Barbie dolls with big chests and skinny legs, the Rhinemaidens are a synchronized swim team, and the Valkyries are Rockettes.

The deftly operated puppets have a lot of personality, and their interactions with the actors, who loom over them, are a nice touch. The actors become actual giants in this context, and when Mr. Oberliessen, as Siegfried disguised as Gunther, wrestled with Brünnhilde for the Ring, it was strangely lifelike and shocking to see this struggle between a large man and tiny woman. Magic effects, like the green blob of a dragon and the Alberich's transformation into a snake that looked like HVAC tubing, are also much easier to concoct in a marionette theater.

But the breakneck pace of the storytelling left little room for musical expansion. There was none, for example, in Brünnhilde's annunciation of Siegmund's death, one of the most harrowing moments in the cycle. Happily, for the two act finales, we got the musical conclusions of "Die Walküre" and "Götterdammerung," and could leave the theater remembering why we sit through the whole 16 hours.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.