A shot in the dark

CAMBRIDGE -- The gods, they must be sadists. That's the subtext of Neil Bartlett's adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's ''Dido, Queen of Carthage" at the American Repertory Theatre. Marlowe, who was Shakespeare's contemporary, is not done very often, which is a shame. If Shakespeare was the Beatles, he was the Rolling Stones.

Bartlett, a Brit himself, is clearly very fond of the bad boy of Elizabethan theater and sees in his work a model for raging at authoritarianism in all its manifestations. In ''Dido," the luckless lovers are manipulated by forces they don't understand.

But while this ''Dido" is swimming in smart ideas, it has considerable trouble keeping its head above water as a piece of theater. Occasionally there is a beautiful, aria-like monologue, occasionally there is an impressive piece of stagecraft, but the imaginative director's overall conception is disappointingly bland.

The story -- as it has come down from Virgil to Ovid and Marlowe -- lands the warrior Aeneas with his son and some of his soldiers in Carthage after the sack of Troy. The goddesses Venus (his mother) and Juno fight over his fate. Dido, the queen of Carthage, and Aeneas fall in love, but when Jupiter orders Aeneas off to Italy, he abandons Dido.

The problems here begin with the casting of Dido herself. Diane D'Aquila was a treasured member of the ART in the 1980s (''Six Characters in Search of an Author," ''Hot 'n' Throbbing"). But here she suffuses Dido with such an overlay of grand-actress regalia that she seems more Norma Desmond than Cleopatra.

The grandiosity may be Bartlett's doing more than D'Aquila's, as there's more than a touch of high camp to the production. Company regulars Thomas Derrah and Remo Airaldi both play women. Derrah is Juno, Jupiter's wife, done up to look like Mae West, while Airaldi is Dido's nurse in a giant black bra. Derrah is hysterical, Airaldi one drag queen too many. There's an acid queen, too -- Saundra McClain as a funny, Tina Turnerish Venus.

The gods are the best part of the production, though Will LeBow doesn't have much to do as Jupiter, the grand high gold-plated bisexual pooh-bah of the Roman gods who's making merry with Ganymede -- a shirtless, shoeless Trojan shepherd boy -- as the play begins.

And taking center stage is Cupid, complete with bow and arrow and very little else to adorn his body. This is no Baroque-painting, Valentine's-card Cupid. He's more satanic imp than messenger from Venus (who has her issues, too).

Cupid approaches the mortals he's about to inflame with a mixture of curiosity and malevolence. John Kelly's sharply choreographed performance commands the stage, whether he's singing like a countertenor, posing as Aeneas's young and innocent son, or manipulating the red curtain for changes of scenery.

Aside from the curtain, Kelly's performance, and live music by the Carthage Consort of Viols, there isn't much color onstage. In the ART newsletter, Bartlett has complained about the Loeb space, saying ''It needs work to make it really hum" and ''You can't make it work by decorating it." This will come as news to anyone who just saw ''the far side of the moon" or almost anything staged by artistic director Robert Woodruff; Bartlett's answer to the Loeb is to bare the walls and blacken the space.

Nothing comes of nothing, alas. The minimalist staging underscores the aridness of the production. For all the bare (mostly male) flesh, there isn't much passion here. Colin Lane is an articulate Aeneas, and his delivery is poetic and powerful, particularly in describing the hellish fall of Troy, but there is no chemistry between him and D'Aquila.

Perhaps this is Bartlett's way of saying that Aeneas is a cipher, a willing tool of the gods. But it leaves a great big hole in the middle of the play that is only partly filled by the tragic passion we see from Gregory Simmons's Iarbus, who loves Dido, and Karen MacDonald's Anna, who loves Iarbus.

As in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream," the gods -- or fate or human nature -- can make us love someone who is hopelessly in love with someone else. But in Marlowe's world the gods don't make things right; they plunge the dagger in deeper.

Bartlett makes the tragedy clear; he just doesn't make it interesting to watch.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.