Aurélia’s Oratorio re-opens July 22 at the A.R.T. Yang and I saw it last December with our families, but in the end-of-year hustle and bustle, I forgot to write about it. So now that it’s coming back, I’ll take this opportunity to make up for the blog post that never was.

First impressions: it was a strange, strange event, like none I’d ever seen before. (Unusual even for the daring A.R.T. =)) In this show that was a mashup of vaudeville, dance, comedic skits, stage illusionry, and a smidge of Cirque de Soleil-esque acrobatics, there was a lot of velvet, a lot of lace, a lot of antique toys and furniture. The feeling conveyed is decidedly a rich, sweet, nostalgic, lost-in-time kind of Romanticism.

There was also clothing bent on world domination, an unresolved love (or was it the story that was unresolved?), and topsy-turvy defiances of logic and sense, like fanning oneself by holding the fan still and rapidly shaking the head back and forth. Sounds random? It kind of was; there was no plot. The entire thing is like a dream. Vignettes and floating images interspersed with curious and titillating sketches, strung together like a necklace made by a blind drunkard in a bead shop. (Sorry, that was the best I could do. I’m sleepy! I thought sleepy was the best state of mind to be in when writing this review, but maybe not…) But this show certainly don’t let no lack of continuity stop it. Oh no.

Aurélia Thierée is a talented performer. It is impossible to ignore that she is beautifully built—graceful, expressive, and lithe. Throughout the show, she puts this fact to good use, whether swirling around in midair in a tangle of velvet drapes or dance-wrestling with another character over ownership of a coat. Or getting out of an old dresser, and realizing at the last silly minute she has too many legs. The comedic absurdity wouldn’t have been so exquisite if she were not such an attractive, well-proportioned lady. I mean, you simply just don’t expect attractive, well-proportioned ladies to have extra legs…

One thing that pops out is that, amid all the beauty and tasteful silliness, is a note of darkness. There’s a puppet suicide following an attempt to molest Aurélia, and holes in abdomens through which a toy train circles, to mention a few moments. It is certainly not your average sweet ‘n charming holiday theater treat. But even the dark imagery is couched in a surreal, dreamlike tone, so that the overall effect is one of mesmerizing mystery rather than stark shock.

In the end, I appreciate the ambiguity of the performance, that it was not simply a straight-forward sugar-coated romp. It seemed to be more of a carefully orchestrated depiction of the act of dreaming. In fact, walking out of this show, I definitely had a visceral “waking up in the morning” kind of experience. It was like REM sleep, on stage.

And it turns out, art mimics life mimics art. The next morning, Yang’s mom reported dreaming about trains climbing up the stairs of their home.

I recommend seeing this later this month if you can. Ideally it would be an evening show followed by a glass of wine and staring at the stars on the Commons. You know, if it ever stops raining.