Robert Wilson, provocative playwright and director, dies at 83

Straits Times

21 hours ago

NEW YORK – Robert Wilson, the acclaimed theatre director, playwright and visual artist who shattered theatrical norms with stunning stagings of his own imaginative works, as well as innovative collaborations with a diverse roster of artists from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga, died on July 31 at his home in Water Mill, New York. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by Mr Chris Green, the executor of his estate and president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Wilson died after a brief illness.
Tall, soft-spoken and a conservative dresser, Wilson looked more like an accountant than an avant-gardist with a long resume of provocative productions. But there was nothing conventional about his sense of the stage.
He often said that he was less interested in dialogue and a narrative arc than in the interaction of light, space and movement. Even when he watched television, he said, he switched the sound off.
Early in his career, Wilson established a working method in which new pieces would begin not with lines of text but with richly detailed visual images, which he would either draw or describe in a ledger he carried with him.
'I've had the idea for a long time of a room with lots of books, all placed neatly on shelves, and something slicing through the shelves' was how he described his startling vision for his 1977 theatre piece, I Was Sitting On My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating.
In an interview with The New York Times shortly before its premiere, he went on: 'There is a telephone, and a telephone wire. There is a scrim or gauze over the front of the stage, and images are sometimes projected on it.'
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Dialogue would find its way into the ledger later in the process. It might be fragmentary and repetitious – or there might be none at all. The seven-hour Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd), from 1971, and the 12-hour The Life And Times Of Joseph Stalin, from 1973, were entirely silent.
Even when directing William Shakespeare, Wilson sometimes had his actors distort the rhythms of the dialogue to suggest new meanings. Other times, he trimmed the text radically, as in a 1990 production of King Lear in Frankfurt, Germany.
Time was an important element for Wilson too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Wilson expanded it.
His stage work, Ka Mountain And Guardenia Terrace , which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage or slicing an onion.
'To see someone try to act natural onstage seems so artificial,' he told the Times in 2021. 'If you accept it as being something artificial, in the long run, it seems more natural, for me.'
By contrast, Wilson's first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Glass, Einstein On The Beach (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein's love of playing the violin.
And while it has plenty of text – counting sequences, solfege syllables, the lyrics to the pop song Mr. Bojangles and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs – none of it is dialogue. The audience, free to leave and return during a performance, is presented with ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.
A son of Texas
Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, on Oct 4, 1941, to lawyer Diugiud Mims Wilson Jr and homemaker Velma Loree Hamilton. Because he had a stammer as a child, his parents sent him to study dance in the hope of building his self-confidence.
His teacher, Ms Byrd Hoffman, noticed that the boy's problem was that he was trying to speak too quickly, and his words were colliding. She taught him to slow down and focus his thought processes, and he overcame his impediment, although he later used the halting patterns and repetition of his childhood stammer as an element in his work.
'Byrd Hoffman was in her 70s when I first met her,' Wilson told the website Theater Art Life in 2020. 'She taught me dance, and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through.'
He memorialised his teacher by using her name in several projects, including his first New York ensemble, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which underwrites various projects of his, including the Watermill Center, a 4ha arts incubator on Long Island's South Fork.
Wilson enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1959 to study business administration, but dropped out in 1962. While there, however, he took a job working in the kitchen of the Austin State Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped. At his request, he was soon reassigned to the hospital's recreation department, where he used the skills he had learnt from Ms Hoffman to help patients channel their energy into making art.
He moved to Brooklyn in 1963 and studied architecture and interior design at Pratt Institute, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1965.
While a student at Pratt, he designed puppets for Motel, the final play in Jean-Claude van Itallie's satirical America Hurrah trilogy, which was staged at the Pocket Theatre in New York and at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He also earned money working as a therapist for brain-damaged children.
Wilson presented experimental works of his own at the Peerless Theatre , a movie house across the street from Pratt. He briefly returned to Texas at his parents' insistence, but his life as a young gay man with theatrical interests proved difficult for him under the eyes of his deeply religious family. He attempted suicide, he said, and was briefly institutionalised in Texas.
On his release, he returned to New York, where he rented a loft in SoHo and started the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. While writing his early plays, he supported himself by teaching acting and movement classes in Summit, New Jersey, where one day, in 1968, he saw an altercation between a police officer and a young black man, Raymond Andrews, who was deaf and mute and unable to defend himself.
Wilson took the teenager under his wing, appearing in court on his behalf and eventually adopting him.
Wilson collaborated with Andrews on Deafman Glance (1971), which he described as a 'silent opera'. By then, he had attracted notice with his first mature work, The King Of Spain (1969). Seeing this three-hour, plot-free play, Harvey Lichtenstein, director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, commissioned Wilson's next work, The Life And Times Of Sigmund Freud (1969).
Einstein On The Beach
In 1975, shortly after producing A Letter For Queen Victoria and The $ Value Of Man, Wilson disbanded his Byrd ensemble and – after two years of discussion about a subject – began work with Glass on Einstein On The Beach. Glass, recognising that he and Wilson shared ideas about the expansiveness of time, had approached him about collaborating in 1973.
Einstein, which had its premiere at the Festival d'Avignon in France in July 1976 and was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, has proved to be among the most durable works in Wilson and Glass's catalogues. It has been recorded three times and revived regularly, with world tours in 1985, 1992 and 2012-15.
'What it means exactly is hard to put in words,' John Rockwell wrote in the Times after the Avignon premiere. 'Wilson calmly accepts most interpretations people care to make. The phrase 'on the beach' may have some reference to the post-apocalyptic novel of that name. The overall theme of the play might be said to be a consideration of the same moral and cosmic issues that concerned Einstein himself in his later years, principally the role of science in the modern world and the relation of science to religion.'
Wilson and Glass went on to produce other operas , White Raven (1998) and Monsters Of Grace (1998). In 2022, Wilson produced H-100 Seconds To Midnight, a work inspired by physicist Stephen Hawking, with texts by Etel Adnan and music by Glass and Dickie Landry.
From Ginsberg to Gaga
Wilson's other notable collaborations include Euripides' Alcestis (1986) with Laurie Anderson; Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, Great Day In The Morning (1982), and stagings of Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung (1995) and Franz Schubert's Winterreise (2001) for soprano Jessye Norman.
He was also commissioned by the then-Singapore Arts Festival for 2000's Hot Water which divided audiences. Then Straits Times theatre critic Clarissa Oon called it 'the theatrical equivalent of a musical fountain'.
He was also commissioned by Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay in 2004 to make I La Galigo, a three-hour, 10-minute adaptation of a 6,000-page Bugis epic.
He also worked several times with singer-songwriter Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called Video Portraits of her, posing her in the guise of subjects of historic paintings.
Wilson's other creative partners included actors Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renee Fleming, Alan Cumming and several animals – i ncluding a porcupine and a snowy owl – all of whom sat for Video Portraits he produced in 2004. The series has been screened at more than 50 museums and galleries around the world, as well as in Times Square.
'My theatre is formal. It's different from the way most directors work,' Wilson told Texas Monthly in 2020. 'It's another world I create; it's not a world that you see wherever you are, if you're in your office or if you're on the streets or at home. This is a different world.
'It's a world that's created for a stage. Light is different. The space is different. The way you walk is different. The way you sing is different than the way you sing in the shower.'
He added: 'Theatre serves a unique function in society. It's a forum where people come together and can share something together for a brief period of time. Art has the possibility of uniting us. And the reason that we make theatre – the reason we call it a play – is we're playing. We're having fun. And if you don't have fun playing, then don't do it.'
Wilson is survived by Andrews, along with a sister, Suzanne, and a niece, Lori Lambert. NYTIMES