`BLACK RIDER' IS AS DARK AS ITS NAME WILSON/WAITS WORK A HAUNTED AFFAIR.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

There is no sound too jarring, jangling, mumbled or misplaced not to have a place in Robert Wilson's ``The Black Rider.'' There is no note too discordant, no instrument too obscure, to find itself orphaned from Tom Waits' score.

The visuals are equally arresting. With director Wilson also designing the production's sets and lighting, ``The Black Rider'' delights in sparse forests, collapsing trees, ``Alice in Wonderland''-esque depth perception and huge, looming shadow puppets. A self-propelling box, sized somewhere between a coffin and a phone booth, serves as the ``Black Rider's'' clown closet. The players emerge from it one by one, then pack themselves back in - taking bits of scenery - once their work is done. Or maybe the box has swallowed them back up.

All of this audiovisual revelry is in the service of ... gosh, can anybody really know? A phantasmagoric fable involving lovers, spirits and the devil himself, ``The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets'' proves to be a little to chilly, and far too cool for the room.

The creators are certainly an intriguing mix: Wilson, the Texas-born artist and opera director whose canvases tend toward the lengthy and offbeat; Waits the equally eclectic songsman; and Beat poet William S. Burroughs who wrote ``The Black Rider's'' book a few years before his death in 1997. You can hear Burroughs' pre-recorded voice a couple of times during the performance. Indeed, this production is lousy with ghosts.

Our tale - based on a German folk yarn - tells of a clerk who must shoot straight in order to win a forester's daughter. Our boy has a rival, but he's also got the devil - here called Pegleg - in his corner. And things can get interesting when you bargain with the underworld.

In this landscape, you can't easily tell the demons from the do-gooders. An ancient forester named Kuno (played by Richard Strange) hovers, oracle-like, over the proceedings in a portrait giving pronouncements of the ``do what you will'' variety. A gray-robed John Vickery is equally menacing as a kind of carnival barker and, later, the deliverer of a fractured schizophrenic monologue.

Our clerk, Wilhelm (Matt McGrath), is a black-clad figure, hair slicked back and in white face (like the rest of the cast), who creeps around the stage, grins maniacally and is on the verge of madness even before he cashes in with Pegleg. Kathchen the bride (Mary Margaret O'Hara) favors the color red and totes a wooden goose. In the second act, she belts out a sultry love song to her absent Wilhelm; it contains - of course - plenty of shooting imagery.

As previously mentioned, you never quite know what strains are to come from music director Bent Clausen and the Magic Bullet band. The score contains cracked waltzes, ballads, snippets of folk ditties, and anything and everything else Waits tosses into the stew.

Tragic though this fable is, Wilson has said that he sees the work as bordering on comedy, and indeed ``The Black Rider'' has much burlesque going for it.

What it isn't - underneath all that offbeat artistry and production largess - is terribly entertaining.

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

THE BLACK RIDER: THE CASTING OF THE MAGIC BULLETS - Two and one half stars

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through June 11.

Tickets: $45 to $95; call [phone].

In a nutshell: Great visuals, but a chilly theatrical experience.

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Photo:

Nigel Richards in a scene from ``The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets,'' at the Ahmanson Theatre.