I returned from Southeast Asia apparently dragging the heat and humidity with me but absolutely unable to get the last thing I saw onstage before I left out of my head: BLACK SWAN!

Melanie Moore (Nina)/Credit: Hawver and Hall

This world premiere production still onstage until July 12 at the American Rep Theater, is a semi-brilliant take on the Oscar-nominated film for which Natalie Portman won the Oscar for Best Actress as a ballerina in psychological extremis. Nina, a young ballerina here played by the extraordinary Melanie Moore, tackles the dual role of the quintessential ballet, Tchaikovsky’s SWAN LAKE, in which the Black Swan Odile– physically identical to the White Swan Odette– seduces a prince away from her doppelganger thus sealing Odette’s fate to live forever under the spell of an evil sorcerer.

Like the film, this production tackles the duality of identity at the heart of the ballet with all of its metaphorical implications within the hyper-competitive world of ballet. That duality is echoed in Nina’s personal life as a fledgling prima ballerina who’s been infantilized and cannibalized by her domineering dancer/mother Barbara (well-played by understudy Mehry Eslaminia) who lives through her. Nina is also under the tutelage of the company artistic director, here played by a woman, Margaux LeRoy (Amber Iman) whose own career hangs on creating something new which she sees in Nina.

Melanie Moore & Ensemble/Credit: Hawver and Hall

Jen Silverman’s smart book strips out the male characters: no lecherous male company director, spell-casting Von Rothbart, or befuddled Prince Siegfried. It doubles down on the drama of the dual female identity which this role requires of its heroine. This doubling is played out against a seeming hall of mirrors, sometimes shattering to reflect this young woman’s bloody attempt to piece together the shards of her expressed and unexpressed impulses, the darker, more sexualized of which a competing ballerina, the sensual Lily (Jada Simone Clark) easily embodies. The result is a phantasmagoria of fractured desires, competing relationships, illusions vs reality culminating in a devastating tableau which finds Nina rising to the rafters, sacrificed on the altar of art.

Melanie Moore (Nina) and Ensemble/ Credit: Hawver and Hall

There are many ways to successfully create such a reality on film. But onstage? It is one rare bird. I have never seen such astonishing stagecraft- lighting, sets, music, and choreography– put to such stunning effect. Never have I seen the “tangible” more viscerally evoke the “intangible” as we experience the altered consciousness of an artist wrangling with her splintered self.  I sat there enthralled by Melanie Moore’s staggering execution of Sonya Tayeh’s genius direction and choreography which culminates in Nina dancing a frenzied pas de deux– with herself!  Her hair wild, limbs grotesquely askew as the black swan of her repressed persona twists itself free, wings sprouting from pierced flesh…Nina becomes a creature subsumed in an ecstasy of artistic triumph.

Act II is where the music by Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) comes into its own- and not a moment too soon. I wish I’d plugged my ears and escaped the grating hum razoring throughout Act I– to suggest tension, I suppose. That din was punctuated by lumpy, lyrically-limited songs, lacking melody and mystery; a minor key here and there would have helped. There were corny samplings of Tchaikovsky’s SWAN LAKE score, and one scene that made me laugh out loud which I’m sure wasn’t the desired effect. Imagine a nightmare of NUTCRACKERS tromping toward our heroine, hallucinating and horrified as she conjures a future of backwater productions of another Tchaikovsky favorite, this one an over-roasted Christmas chestnut.

If you’ve already seen BLACK SWAN, I hope this review opens up an additional way of thinking about a very complex work.  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend doing so – you will see things here you’ve never seen before, much of which is sublime and has stayed with me weeks after the experience. BLACK SWAN at American Repertory Theater extended through JULY 12!