These kinds of emotional middle grounds are characteristic of Mendes, who works harder at creating moods than at anything else. He has his own take on whatever the emotion is that has equal parts sadness and hope-it's what you get at the end of a Grey's Anatomy episode or an Allstate commercial (Are you in good hands? I want to be. I think I am?! [cries]). Five films in, his career's iconic moment is still American Beauty's Wes Bentley (late of Ghost Rider) filming the garbage bag swirling around. He has made two movies about how the suburbs are suffocating. So: this is not exactly an ideas guy.

Both of this year's productions can be boring, but both are also lots of fun to watch. BAM's Harvey Theater is attractively dilapidated, and Tom Piper's sets and Catherine Zuber's costumes match: wood, nice muted color palettes, lots of "exposed" stuff. It's a semi-industrialized version of shabby chic, AKA what "Brooklyn" looks like. There's also some great acting by both Brits and Americans (transatlanticism being the point of the Bridge Project). If you have twenty bucks and a free evening, it would be a good idea to go see one. Here's how you might choose.

As You Like It is a satire on the pastoral, a genre that isn't doing too well these days outside of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Its plot is: a bunch of courtiers head into the forest of Arden, where they meet, make fun of and then sometimes fall in love with simple folk. Today we still more or less understand the pastoral's broader outlines-simpler times, trees, unsophisticated honesty-but many of the specifics have been forgotten. So you get the feeling, as you watch people banter, that you're missing things. I mean the play is four hundred years old, after all.

Fortunately you can turn to Rosalind for guidance, because she gets everything. Rosalind, played by Juliet Rylance (who is really good), is the kind of genius-level intelligent character that people who aren't Shakespeare don't write very often. There's a really well-directed moment early on where Touchstone the clown is playing word games with Rosalind and her best friend Celia (if you are anti-pun, you should see another play, and probably steer clear of Shakespeare or fun in general). Touchstone is quick, but Rosalind is quicker, and finishes one of his riddles for him, while Celia looks on blankly.

Rosalind then meets Orlando, who is played by Rylance's real-life husband Christian Camargo. They fall immediately and awkwardly in love, and then each is separately forced to leave Duke Frederick's kingdom. When they meet again in Arden, Orlando is hanging his terrible love poems all over the place, on trees, and Rosalind is disguised as a man.

Now at this point what's supposed to happen is some A-level onstage flirting. Rosalind is in love, but she's smart enough to be suspicious of having gone head over heels so quickly, and she also knows that Orlando is a little immature ("From the east to western Ind / No jewel is like Rosalind," is how one of his tree-poems starts, which seems like a pretty obvious call for concern). So, disguised as Ganymede, she tells Orlando that she will help him snap out of his infatuation. All he has to do is visit her/him every day, pretend that she/he is Rosalind, and try to woo her. This is an awesome plan.

But Carmago ruins things by playing it as though Orlando really can't see the woman he loves underneath the summery blazer and straw fedora. So instead of insane sparks flying all over the place, we get Orlando being genuinely confused about why this short guy in the forest is so into the little role-play they have going. After they kiss, Carmago gets embarrassed at having done a gay thing. I'm not going to quote every line of Orlando's that is obviously flirting, but they are everywhere. It seems impossible to me that Rosalind would fall for someone who was actually that dumb. (As a suitor, Orlando gets especially upstaged by the peasant Silvius, who is played by Aaron Krohn. He tells the woman he loves–who can't stand him, by the way–that he will marry her "though to have her and death were one thing." That, it seems to me, is how you do it.)

The other best thing about As You Like It is the melancholic Jacques (that's "Jay-kwees"). He's played by Stephen Dillane, who is great in almost everything. In the first place, he has the advantage of looking a little like Daniel Day-Lewis, which is a great way for an actor to look. He does a funny Bob Dylan impression in the second act, and he also delivers the "All the world's a stage" speech like it's just something he decided to say, as opposed to the "All the world's a stage" speech. He makes his first appearance by asking a group of musicians to keep singing. They're pretty tired of singing, and somebody's voice is hoarse, but Jacques is insistent: "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs," he says. I identified hard with that line.

Dillane, as Prospero, is also the best reason to go see The Tempest, although he sometimes drops his voice so low that it's difficult to hear. As the play is set on an explicitly magical island, it also involves more stage tricks, which are gracefully done. The acting is not quite as good, and there are fewer jokes; but if you are interested in monsters with skull-heads, island spirits with scary metallic wings, and reflecting pools, The Tempest is probably what you'll want to see.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

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All of which is to say: damn, girl. You might just be the story of my eye for this whole frighteningly exhilarating decade.

So when BAM told us that Huppert would star in their staging of the Heiner Müller play Quartett-itself fitfully derived from the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses-I was basically guaranteed to go. And look, I'm already mad at life because director Robert Wilson's sole New York staging of the Philip Glass opera Einstein On the Beach happened before I was born-so the fact that he would be directing Huppert amounted to a ridiculous buttercream icing on top.

Still, I was afraid that I'd see Quartett and love it for the evanescent fumes of its participants' past successes, even if the production itself blew. But it didn't. It really didn't. You can fault Wilson for having stock moves: deep reds and blues on the lighting tip, "surprise" non-diegetic sounds amplified at ear-splitting volume, or his ritualized, glacially-paced blocking. But then there's also the if-it-ain't-broke argument: these theatrical gestures are all still powerful in performance, just like David Lynch's grab-bag of tricks retains the power to spook after all these years. (Yes, it's a dark room, and yes, it sounds like the electricity is going out. Hide under your seat anyway.)

Müller's text (I was previously unfamiliar, BTW), is constructed from jaw-droppingly heavy bricks of Eros-writing, which Wilson-in minimalist fashion-has Huppert split up and repeat in these hypnotic, cellular breakdowns. It's like looking at the same photograph in a series of bracketed exposures. Each time she runs her tongue over the line, it brightens or darkens.

Even if you find Wilson's approach familiar, his tics at least put Huppert's artful voice front and center. The effect is akin to watching an artisan construction worker blast a brilliant, perfect cube into thousands of also-brilliant smaller creations, and employing a jackhammer to perform all that division. It doesn't even matter if you're not familiar with the Dangerous Liaisons original. (All you need to know is that these former lovers are torturing each other, in old age, with their respective tales of past conquests.) It's straight fire like this (in French, with English subs projected above the stage):

MERTEUIL: Did you find the way back into your own hide, Valmont. There is no man whose member won't stiffen at the thought of his dear flesh departing, fear makes philosophers. Welcome to sin and forget the poor box before piety overpowers you and you forget your one true vocation. What else have you learned but to maneuver your cock into a cunt resembling the one you once fell out of, always with the same more or less pleasant result, and always deluded that the applause of those alien mucous membranes is meant for you, and only you, that those screams of lust are addressed to you, while you are nothing but a barren vehicle, indifferent and totally interchangeable, for the lust of the woman who is using you, the power drunk fool of her creation. You know well enough that every man is one man too few for a woman. You also know, Valmont: soon enough fate will catch up with you and you won't even be that anymore, a man too few. Even the gravedigger will enjoy himself with us.



VALMONT: I am bored with the bestiality of our conversation. Every word rips a gash, every smile bares a fang. We should let tigers play our parts. Another bite, please, another strike of the paw. The stage craft of wild beasts.

A pair of dancers stand in for the pair during these conversations-slipping one another into nooses, leather straps and whatnot-all behind a scrim. A fifth character, an old man, is added to this quartet with no explanation. He performs a funky dance in between set changes that I could've done without, but no matter: his interludes at least gave (a lot of) people the opportunity to bail on the performance without interrupting any of the talky parts.

Anyway, this thing plays one more time, on Saturday. It's pretty sold out, but some people were getting in on standby Thursday night, from what I could see. And if you can't make it, well, it's still worth checking out Müller via Amazon or from your local library.

But here's yet another consolation prize (of sorts): a leak of one of the hotter songs from Don't Stop, the long-delayed second album from the Norwegian bubblegum-indie blogstar Annie, which comes out next Tuesday. My Love Is Better plows some of the same ground as Quartett, oddly enough.

The dance-all-night guitar hook was played by the dude from Franz Ferdinand-making perhaps a better argument for Franz Ferdinand's existence than I ever expected was possible. More importantly, the lyric is a come-hither-cum-get-your-ass-away-from-me switchblade: "I'll let you go down if you go away / I need to know you're happy to play / I'll let you touch me every now and then / And if you want some yeah I'll tell you when (when when)," Annie sings toward the end, before diving into her chorus for the last time:

My love is better (Than your love)
My heart is better (Than your heart)
My moves are better (Than your moves)
My shoes smell better
And I'm be-be-be-better
My kiss is wetter (Than your kiss)
My lips are better (Than your tricks)
You know you never (Had my hips)
I'm so much better (So eat this)

Including a "better heart" in the middle of any thorough itemization of advantages one has over an ex-lover carries a useful poetic undercurrent: how much better can that ruthless heart really be, after all? It's a hot contradiction. Could it be that-whether in pop music or in avant-garde theater-this taunting unavailability turns out to be perhaps slightly more than half the fun of coupling? Happy weekend, everyone. Go get some.

Previously: The Pleasure Principle

Seth Colter Walls is a culture reporter at Newsweek. Previously, he wrote about U.S. and Middle East politics for a variety of outlets.

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"Excuse me," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Surely," I replied, probably a little over-happy because my life is plainly more enjoyable than Bill Clinton's was when he was president.

"Oh," the woman said, stopping herself. "Are you a New Yorker?"

"Yes," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Because your hair is neat and you said 'surely.'"

"Oh. Well, yes, I live in New York. But that wasn't your original question. What's up?" I said, eager to move this subway conversation along.

"Tell me what I am," she said.

I blinked dumbly, even though I was beginning to understand what she was asking me to do. "Go ahead, be brutal," she said. "On a scale from 1 to 10."

With 10 being what, exactly? Deneuve in her prime? And 1 being what? The unemployably disfigured? I did not ask these questions-and I all of a sudden wondered where my train was.

"Six!" I blurted, thinking it a number neither off-the-charts patronizing nor unduly insulting. In all honesty, it was hard to get a read. (Sweats maybe aren't the best choice if you're gonna walk around the city asking to be rated.)

"Oh, that's harsh," she said, stumbling backward toward the stairs as though she'd been struck. "You didn't sugar-coat that six, did you?"

"No," I lied. "You asked me for the truth, and I gave it to you."

"Oh, six," she said, turning to walk up the stairs and out of the station.

While the heterosexual male instinct is to judge any conversation initiated by a woman as a sexual approach-even if it is on the phone and the subject happens to be one's infrequent credit card payments-I had no idea what had happened in that moment, and I still don't.

That is to say, language proved insufficient in defining the contours of our interaction. Banal, maybe, but true. I'd give something of value to have the moment back-to expand or revisit it somehow so that she knew, at the least, that I meant her no harm. (I'd have bumped her up to a 9 if I realized my answer had the potential to make or break her evening.)

I thought about this be-sweatpantsed woman more than a few times during "Lipsynch," Robert Lepage's eight-plus hour theater/video/musical gesamtkunstwerk, which is at BAM this week-and which you still have time to catch in a marathon session on both Saturday and Sunday. Basically, because I think it's worth seeing, I don't want to spoil the narrative for you. It's more consistently engaging than any 8-hour thing has a right to be.

Lepage's stage wizardry features sets that collapse and expand, mid-act, into locales as different as an airplane, the London tube, a film set, a radio studio, a disco. The effect is both technically awesome and, somehow, emotionally communicative about the fluid geography of thoughts and intentions. The piped-in music Lepage has picked ranges from Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 to blah metal (not kidding), and from Joy Division to a couple Bacharach tunes-all of which are employed pretty tastefully. Sometimes the actors are lip-synching to pre-recorded tracks of their lines, and sometimes we're given to understand that this is the case. Other times, it's not totally clear.

The macro story is one common to a lot of fancy-pants filmmaking (think Altman or, guh, Paul Thomas Anderson, if you must). By this I mean we're talking about the contingency and chance of human relationships-how they come together, how they fall apart, who tells whom what (or not) and how/why. We travel, across decades, from pre-Civil War Nicaragua to contemporary London, with stopovers in Germany and Quebec. In each act, the voice (or lack thereof) is undermined in ways that could seem pretentious, I guess, if you're the type for whom pretentiousness is a thing to be guarded against so zealously that enjoying modern things is rather out of the question. Or else if you're the kind of person for whom any new innovation in staging requires light-year advances in explicit meaning, lest the advances show that the artists are all hollow inside-which is how critic Charles Isherwood seemed to suggest you should think of a theatrical work this purposefully diffuse in the Times last week. After noting a) "the flawless acting," b) that Lepage's direction is "abundant in startling moments of fine stagecraft" and c) that "printed words do not go far in conveying the excitements of such imagery onstage," he then decides d) it's not worth it for you to go check out, because its conceptual underpinnings "register lightly and are not fully dramatized." Which is to say, you meet a complex thing, give it the once-over, and then must rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of whether or not it's worth your time. NEXT!

Or else maybe not, sometimes.

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