Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.
Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.
“Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.
