Robert Wilson, Provocative Playwright and Director, Is Dead at 83

New York Times

a day ago

Robert Wilson, the acclaimed theater director, playwright, choreographer and visual artist who mounted wildly imaginative stagings of his own works — including collaborations with Philip Glass, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lady Gaga — as well as contemporary operas and classic plays from the standard repertory, died on Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by Chris Green, the executor of his estate and the president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Wilson died after a brief illness.
Tall, soft-spoken and a conservative dresser, Mr. Wilson looked more like an accountant than an avant-gardist with a long résumé 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, and that even when he watched television, he turned the sound off.
Early in his career, Mr. 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 detail in a 9-by-12 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 theater 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.' (In its subsequent review, The Times took note of the work's 'monstrous title.')
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 'Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,' from 1973, were entirely silent.
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