Over the years, 3-D movies have tended toward the cheesy. What can you expect from an entertainment medium requiring a room full of viewers to watch through cheap cardboard-and-mylar glasses just to get some illusory sense of depth? As a medium for art, might as well try playing classical theater to an audience wearing funny hats.

Then again, Monsters of Grace, a self-styled "digital opera in three dimensions," does make use of those goofy cardboard polarizing specs, albeit designer ones donated by l.a. Eyeworks, combining them with the latest in computer animation technology to create a distinctly high-art multimedia event. This historic production-now concluding a 28-city tour of North America-reunites designer-director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass, whose 1976 collaboration Einstein on the Beach is a cultural landmark.