Actually, the title character, Smith (Mark Blum), comes out and tells us exactly what he's thinking, at least at first. A ruefully insignificant middle-aged professor, he's forever returning to fond memories of his years teaching music at a small-town boarding school. Music trickles both from a stageside band and from choral voices just offstage, and video projections by Greg Emetaz help conjure a creative idyll in Smith's life when, he says, he spent his evenings feeling "nostalgia for the day I'd just lived through."

Any warm glow generated by this wistful opening starts to cool as soon as we flash back to those purportedly happy school days, in which a gaggle of precocious teens--mostly girls, it's hard not to notice--taunt a kvetchy, irritated Smith. "Go to hell," he tells them, not entirely good-naturedly. A single man hanging around a bunch of nubile coeds, he soon sublimates whatever frustrations he might be feeling--where else?--into the creation of an opera with his best student, Jane (Sarah Wolfson, who alternates in the role with Kathryn Skemp).

By the time we're watching their student opera in its entirety, and an adult Jane (Kellie Overbey) has emerged to provide her side of the backstory, we've lost whatever thread we were holding onto. It feels like we've entered the theatrical workshop of a well-funded madman, where the strange, often intricately designed parts don't hang together. This opera, for starters: Just where did this turgid toga melodrama, starring Jane and a young Smith (Jeffrey Picón, alternating with Wayne Hobbs), come from? Are we supposed to see it as a parody of youthful pretension, or take it as seriously as the singers do? In either case, what does it have do with the weirdly clinical binge of sex and despair that follows?