Robert Wilson’s The Old Woman, featuring actor Willem Defoe and famed dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, debuted at UCLA’s Royce Hall last night, on tour from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Wilson, a renowned composer who collaborated with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, adapted the play from Daniil Kharms’s short story Starukha, written during the height of Stalinism.

The meandering plot has the deadpan humor of Beckett and the self-aware absurdity of Brecht. Throughout the vaudeville, Defoe and Baryshnikov interact in ways both comic and mundane, repeating each others words as if playing two different sides of the same character. A ragtime beat marches on, punctured by occasional breaths of silence. The spare set is drenched in rich blocks of color like a true Suprematist vision.

The Old Woman will run November 21-23 in Berkeley, California.