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Last night BC and I saw The Black Rider at ACT, sadly missing AA Bronson’s lecture at CCA. It was a really wonderful and magical production, although I would love it if our country embraced and supported a true avant-garde, like presenting Wilson’s 12-hour silent opera or something, but hey, I’m happy to settle for Marianne Faithful as the devil, and William Burroughs writing about a woman who gets shot at the end of the piece. Some images were just stunning, as in the family lounging around the bloody carcasses of the animals that Wilhelm shot to win his love’s hand. (The father of his lover prefers that she marry a hunter rather than Wilhelm, a clerk, so Wilhelm makes a deal with the devil for some magic bullets that will hit any target.) Marianne Faithfull’s voice is like a sculpture itself, occupying the space so fully and distinctively. Susan Sontag said something once about her first experience of a Wilson opera as eliciting a “shock of recognition.” I think that she was talking about seeing something that she had been longing to see, but without knowing what it was, until she finally saw it. I felt a similar sense of recognition, but it was more related to seeing so many familiar styles and media synthesized into such a fresh experience.