Lost - Michael Weyandt as Pete, Alice Teyssier as Renee and Raphael Sacks as Mr. Eddy.

Raphael Sacks responded to a cattle call to get the part of Mr. Eddy. When he auditioned for the role in Oberlin Conservatory's Lost Highway — Olga Neuwirth's operatic adaptation of the David Lynch film — the blue-eyed, blond and curly-locked boy sang a bit of Schubert for the directors. That was nice, but they were looking for someone who could incarnate evil rage for the important role of an aging porn-king mobster: Mr. Eddy has the dramatic duty of bludgeoning a man to death with words, for smoking. He needs to push his vocal bass across four octaves into improvised falsetto shrieks. So they asked him to take a crack at that.

"I read through the scene once to myself," Sacks says. "I got what was going on, and threw up my hands thinking, "All right, here goes.' And I freaked out. Not to start legends about myself but apparently before they cast me, they went around asking people who knew me well if I was crazy, and if they'd be able to work with me."

That was last fall. This week, Mr. Eddy's rage and the musical psycho-thriller Lost Highway will be unveiled — for the first time in the U.S. — at Oberlin's Finney Chapel. The work by Neuwirth and the librettist, Nobel-winning Elfriede Jelinek, had its world premiere in Graz, Austria in 2003. This will be the second time ever.

Oberlin professor of composition and Lost Highway producer Lewis Nielson says he'd been attracted to Neuwirth's disjointed, boundary-pushing compositional style, and while in conversation with colleagues at Columbia University's Miller Theater in New York, someone suggested that he take a look at her opera. Neilson says the technical challenges —integrating cutting-edge sound and video technology with a compositional style that simply will not give the singers a melody to hang on — were well-suited to the resources of Oberlin College and its Conservatory.

After this weekend's performances in Oberlin, Nielson and his cast and crew will pack up the whole ridiculously ambitious thing and take it to New York for two performances at Miller Theater, Columbia's venue for new opera, classical music, dance and film.

Lost Highway is the story of Fred Madison, a jazz trumpeter in Neuwirth's opera (saxophonist in the film), suffering from a rare mental illness called psychogenic fugue. The National Library of Medicine describes psychogenic fugue as a "disorder of memory that occurs following emotional or psychological trauma and results in a loss of one's personal past, even to the point of lost identity," which apparently sometimes leads to the creation of a new one.

Composer Olga Neuwirth stuck with the disjointed structure of the film, which Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford built in non-linear — and not always chronological — scenes. Early in the story, a series of increasingly weird video tapes arrives at the Madison household. Madison and his wife watch them together, and seeing a grainy, nocturnal tour of their own home (including an overhead view of themselves asleep on their bed), they call the police. It becomes apparent that there's some distance between husband and wife, and that he's questioning her fidelity. Before long a tape arrives that shows, apparently, that he has killed her. The police take him to jail where, while on death row, he morphs into a youthful auto mechanic. The audience sees this as reality, and the jailers treat it as if it is — but what has actually happened goes unexplained.

Lost Highway's subject matter and storytelling structure are challenging, but the technical aspects are something else entirely. During rehearsal last week, Jonathan Field, who directs the staging, said it certainly ranks among the most technically complex productions he has ever worked on. Each of the 30 players in the pit orchestra — Oberlin's contemporary music ensemble — is miked, as are the 11 members of the cast. Instruments and voices are allowed to sound naturally at some parts, but in moments of shifting perspective or mood, they become sources for electronic manipulation. Sounds are processed live through a computer in real time, shifting pitches and modulating to make the voices and instruments take on different personalities.

"The story deals with multiple personalities and the ability of someone to shift realities," says Tom Lopez, sound designer and associate professor of computer music and digital arts at the conservatory. "One way this is carried out is to have a character's voice shift [from natural to digitally processed] while they are singing."

The production also uses a spatial tool for letting the audience know different perspectives are in play. Finney Chapel will be outfitted with 20 loudspeakers, positioned around the hall, which enables the focus of the sound to move with precise control.

"We have a really beautiful performance interface that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch," Lopez says. "You can play it with your finger to move the sound around in the hall."

It's not your grandmother's opera, if indeed it should be called opera at all.

And there's more. All the live action takes place behind a sheer, rectangular scrim, roughly the proportion of a movie screen. The scrim serves as a window, but also a surface for projecting video, which was shot with the cast at locations around town — Field's house and the homes of other faculty members — to take the place of the mysterious video tapes.

The fragmentary, mixed-up and sampled nature of Neuworth's work extends to the composition of the music. What Lynch has done with the disjointed structure and gritty darkness of his film, Neuwirth seems to have done with sound. As she told Newsweek, "My music must always be a riddle. I like to change musical structures very rapidly. There is never a theme you can easily latch onto. I constantly give different angles to my music."

And so she charges performers to improvise, to sing falsetto, and calls for driving dance music and a wild trumpet solo. And then there's another thing.

"I think for every passage of driving dance rhythm," Sacks says, "there is another passage of entirely disorienting music."

Or, in the words of producer Nielson, "I think people are going to say, "Oh my god, what happened to me.'"

Fasten your seatbelts. And not just for the drive.