If you suspect anachronism here, just apply Gertrud Stein's arithmetic. At any rate, it is clear that Purcell's 1689 "Dido and Aeneas" and Virgil Thomson's 1934 "Four Saints in Three Acts" were both written for Mark Morris. At yesterday's U.S. premiere in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, "Saints" came across as Morris' own, just a clearly and delightfully as did "Dido," first seen here five years ago. What an operatic doubleheader! Yes, *opera* because Morris' choreography overlays the original works, presented with soloists, chorus and orchestra. The bad boy/true genius of dance somehow managed to enhance, transform, and preserve the two operas at the same time. Dancing Dido himself perhaps for the last time (I hear things), Morris got away -- brilliantly -- with making this tragic work both delightfully funny and deeply moving. His unique and quirky dance vocabulary brought out aspects of the magnificent Purcell score that you may never hear in a "normal" performance. The Morris "Dido" has been discussed extensively in these parts -- "Saints" was the novelty, the focus of the evening, in its second production only since the English National Opera premiere in June. Here was the dilemma: what would Mr. Quirky do with Thomson's quirky music, written for Stein's quirkiest of libretti? Instead of turning the evening into a ridiculous piece of excess, however, Morris infused the work with a lighthearted, but lyrical and warm sense of honest effort "to make sense" out of deliberate nonsense. Stein's libretto is an experiment on the order of a "composition" consisting of silence. "Generally speaking," she said in commenting on the work, "anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something." It's no use arguing with that premise: "Saints" is what it is -- numbers, numbers, numbers, endless repetition of words and phrases, pigeons on the grass, alas, magpies in the sky, "they might be very well very well very well they might be very well very well..." and so on. Add to that Thomson's hoedown/country dance/four musical themes per hour music, with some melting, gorgeous fragments at the end, and material for Andrew Lloyd Webber to steal for cat recitatives. And out of all this stuff and nonsense, quirkiness ne ultra, Morris created an eminently sensible, sensitive, startling, entertaining, somewhat humorous, but more importantly often beautiful work. I knew better than a woman sitting nearby, desperately trying to read the libretto in the dark; I gave up early on the idea of relating text, music and dance to the "original," admittedly not always -- not most of the time, in fact -- knowing what's happening. And yet, almost always, I "got" the point in this "pointless" series of non-events. The down-to-earth corps (of the all-soloist Morris troupe) show many individual expressions, but the dancers move together, providing a base, a background, a counterpoint to the two sensational soloists. Michelle Yard is St. Teresa, a vital, sturdy, kind and naive force, and rather unsaintly in an almost completely transparent white baby doll. John Heginbotham is a pure vision of St. Ignatius, a remarkable dancer with a most expressive face. Except for one wonderful scene when the two act as none-too-efficient guards at heaven's gate, their interaction is completely up to the viewer's interpretation. Ambiguity is the name of the game for the Messrs. Thomson and Morris, led by Ms. Stein. I don't know how Cal Performances director Robert W. Cole manages, but unlike the deadly recorded music for much larger dance companies, Morris' blissfully numerous productions here always get "real" music and very good performances at that. Craig Smith conducted members of the Berkeley Symphony and the excellent American Bach Soloists chorus. Jennifer Lane was outstanding in singing both Dido and St. Teresa II. Sopranos Jayne West, Jennifer Ellis; mezzo Elspeth Franks; tenor Scott Whitaker; and baritones William Sharp and Hugh Davies sang solo roles in both operas. [log in to unmask] Janos Gereben/San Fran