Running Wild with a War-Horse the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet

By Richard Zoglin

The label of wunderkind can be a fearsome burden for any mere mortal. When Peter Sellars, 27, was named director of the new American National Theater at Washington's Kennedy Center last June, his appointment was greeted with both shock and greedy anticipation. This was, after all, the Harvard prodigy who had made his name with audacious updatings of Shakespeare, transplanted Handel's opera Orlando to Cape Canaveral and spiced up Maxim Gorky's 1904 play Summerfolk with songs by George Gershwin. Yet his first offering at Kennedy Center, a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I directed by Timothy Mayer, was shocking only in its conventionality. So acute was the disappointment of critics and audiences that Sellars closed the play three weeks early.

But even wunderkinder can make false starts. For his second effort at Kennedy Center -- and his first as director -- Sellars has fashioned a dazzlingly original production of The Count of Monte Cristo. Exhuming this melodramatic war-horse, a stage version of Alexandre Dumas's novel that James O'Neill (Eugene's father) adapted and toured in for 30 years, was just the first of Sellars' bold choices. In program notes, he proclaims that "the evening contains at least five different plays, each with its own method and tone"; cites influences as diverse as Bertolt Brecht and D.W. Griffith; and even warns patrons that "there is no seat in the house from which the entire production can be seen. After all, this isn't television."

No mistake there. Sellars has let his theatrical imagination run wild. The stage of the Eisenhower Theater, stripped to the pipes and rafters, is a cavernous expanse of catwalks, stairways, trapdoors and art deco modules that glide across the stage unloading and gobbling up performers. A string quartet provides onstage musical accompaniment, while the actors (their faces often decorated with red or green war paint) are showered with a hodgepodge of spotlight effects meant to simulate movie close-ups. Most of the 3 1/2 hours is played at fever-pitch intensity; yet the climactic dueling scene is performed in virtual darkness, and in hushed tones barely above a whisper.

Sellars' furious improvisations are sometimes arbitrary and pretentious, and more than a little of the text sinks in the mire of expressionistic excess. But his reworking is so full of passion, inventiveness and sheer theatrical verve that one cannot help cheering. Dumas's tale of Edmond Dantes, a young - seaman in Napoleonic- era France who is unjustly imprisoned for 18 years and then escapes to seek revenge on those who wronged him, could have been a routine exercise in nostalgia or camp. But Sellars obviously sees grandeur in the play and is determined to make the audience see it too. If that means flinging in poetry from Byron, music from Beethoven or borrowings from the past 20 years of avant-garde theater, so be it. His stage effects are frequently apt and memorable. When Dantes is thrown into a dungeon, he and a grizzled fellow prisoner (David Warrilow) wail about their plight as their bodies sink beneath the stage. Soon only their heads are visible, lighted starkly from below, in a striking, Beckett-like image of existential despair.

In the title role, Richard Thomas makes the transformation from naive youth to tortured victim to avenging superhero with startling eclat. Roscoe Lee Browne, Patti LuPone, Michael O'Keefe and Zakes Mokae all have riveting individual moments, yet seem completely in step with Sellars' overall vision. In one swoop, Sellars has brought a fresh burst of energy to America's long- running quest for a true national theater. And that is what being a wunderkind is all about.