Usually, the best costumes are the ones that hardly register, the ones that blend with the lights, sound and stagecraft to create the seamless illusion of good theater. Sometimes, though, the pageantry and dress-up inherent in any stage show become the point, as in director and madman Barry Kyle's take on The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Here, the clothes added layers of meaning. Because this strangest of tragedies concerns the tail end of a long desert war, Kyle and the UMKC graduate theater department set it in modern dress: Greek soldiers wore fatigues, the chorus emerged in backpacks and prom dresses, and Odysseus — cast here as a wheedling politician — was, stylewise, a one-man coalition of the willing, in American cowboy boots, a fussy British ascot and robes straight from a Marrakesh market. Later, a costume change drew an actual gasp from the crowd: Wily Odysseus, now speaking in a pinched-up imitation of George W. Bush, paraded from the wings in a head-to-toe burqa made from American flags. Stranger still, it was beautifully made.