Culture of Desire.

In a program note pinpointing the genesis of Culture of Desire, director Anne Bogart's theatrical essay on Andy Warhol and American consumerism, Bogart writes, "I once entered an upstate New York Kmart and experienced an irresistible desire to buy everything in the store." I've had that same feeling, haven't you? Unfortunately, that sentence may be the most intriguing thing about the show, which plays through October 18.

Viewing a fluoreseent-lit department store as a banal vision of Hades and designating Mr. Art-as-Commodity an ideal figure to thrust in the middle of it, Bogart and her Saratoga International Theatre Institute acting company decided to borrow the structure of Dante's Inferno, in which middle-aged Warhol (played by actress Kelly Maurer) as Dante is shepherded through the shopping carts and advertising slogans of American consumer hell by Diana Vreeland (played by Jefferson Mays in a black helmet wig). But rather than saying anything noteworthy about the given subject, this collage of campy poses and diary entries of Warhol fretting about his pimply complexion panders to a dumb-and-dumber mentality.

Bogart has dreamed up conceptual masterworks before. People still talk about her South Pacific set in a school for disturbed children who learn normality singing Rodgers and Hammerstein songs. And her portrait of theater director Robert Wilson, Bob, was an ingenious and revealing homage. With the flat and unfunny Culture of Desire, though, this heavy hitter strikes out.

Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.