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To borrow an idea from the great schlock filmmaker John Waters, it’s a shame that avant-garde works like Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant can’t be sold the way fifties exploitation movies were: No one will be seated during the spine-tingling interspecies golf game! The only way to approach Foreman’s latest is with a sense of humor, laced with a healthy dose of trepidation. If the sight of Willem Dafoe making his entrance in a Samurai topknot, multiple layered dirndl skirts, and socks held up with garters (he’s also carrying a birdcage housing a plastic duck) isn’t enough to scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what is.

Did I mention that Idiot Savant also features writer-director-raconteur Foreman’s trademark lighting design, in which the lights are often trained on the house, bathing the audience in an assaultive, possibly cataract-inducing glare? William Castle, the king of the fifties-B-movie gimmick, couldn’t have come up with a better idea. And yet the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater has also fashioned a plotless work that manages to be at once playful, pretentious, and intentionally confounding—the kind of arch exercise in which characters routinely drop Zen-koan head-scratchers like “If solving a mystery is never possible, then don’t call that a mystery.”

Foreman’s works aren’t designed to make literal sense as you’re watching them. The scraps you take away from his elaborate in-jokes may eventually reshape themselves into a meaningful treatise on the futility of existence—or they may leave you with nothing more than a handful of air. The one concrete thing here is the pleasure Foreman’s actors—including Alenka Kraigher, as a sort of soothsayer in a velvet medieval-princess dress, and Elina Löwensohn, a hard-drinking tough cookie in a shiny Cossack’s outfit—take in this wackadoo material. Dafoe, his crazy topknot aquiver, may be having the most fun of all. There’s comedy in his eyes and murder in his soul. Or maybe it’s the other way around. — Stephanie Zacharek