Games with Ghosts in Müller's Explosion of a Memory: A Study of Pre-ideology in the Müller-Wilson Collaboration

{ 112 } \ Games with Ghosts in Müller’s Explosion of a Memory A Study of Pre-ideology in the Müller-Wilson Collaboration —REBECCA K ASTLEMAN That’s how it was for me working with Bob [Wilson]. . . . Always it was like playing games. HEINER MÜLLER When discussing his experimental drama Explosion of a Memory, the East German playwright Heiner Müller remarked, with characteristic irony, that he had written the piece for an audience of the dead. In producing a text that was to be performed for a congregation of ghosts, Müller asserted, he had merely adhered to the lessons of socialism: “I think it’s just a democratic attitude, because the dead ones are the majority. There are many more dead people than living ones, and you have to write for a majority. This is socialist realism.”1 Explosion of a Memory—whose original German title, Bildbeschreibung, translates literally as “description of a picture”—was written as a prologue to Robert Wilson ’s 1986 production of Euripides’ Alcestis and follows the attempt of an unidentified narrator to describe the violent scene he sees in an image.2 By satirically categorizing this text as a performance of socialist values, Müller suggests an alternative context for understanding the significance of his collaboration with Wilson on Alcestis. In the following pages I will trace Müller’s dramaturgy as it unfolds in Explosion of a Memory and, in so doing, outline the means by { 113 } GAMES WITH GHOSTS IN MÜLLER which Müller and Wilson’s collaboration on Alcestis complicates common assumptions about the partnership between these two artists. The production of Alcestis developed by Wilson and Müller, which was first staged at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been largely overlooked by both critics and scholars. Although Müller’s partnership with Wilson has merited extensive analysis, critics have repeatedly minimized the importance of Alcestis while simultaneously identifying other Wilsonian epics to which Müller contributed—such as the CIVIL warS and Death Destruction & Detroit—as pivotal events in contemporary performance. Such discussions have been too hasty in their dismissal of Müller’s role in the making of Alcestis, which marked both a turning point in Müller and Wilson’s collaboration and a milestone in the history of new American drama. Wilson’s prior productions—most of which were based on classical operas or original narratives, and which generally featured texts that Wilson himself had developed—had little in common with Alcestis. While it was not the first time Wilson had engaged with classical drama, Alcestis did mark his first attempt to stage a literary text without a full musical accompaniment. At first the director struggled with this emphasis on the written word: he was stymied by the density of Euripides’ language and dissatisfied with his attempts to balance the narrative of Alcestis with the stage images in his design. In the initial workshops for the production in the summer of 1985, Wilson blocked the entire play “and then realized it was a mess.”3 In response he assembled his own spare adaptation, drawing upon multiple translations and drastically cutting the script, but even after these modifications he was uneasy with the text. Explosion of a Memory, Müller’s contribution to the script, arrived at a point when the director felt that he had “almost no place to go” with his own adaptation .4 Müller had worked with Wilson on two occasions prior to Alcestis: the first was the Cologne chapter of the CIVIL warS, in 1984, and the second was an original opera, Medea, which was composed by Gavin Bryars and premiered in the same year. For Alcestis, Wilson initially intended to use the entire text of Müller’s Explosion of a Memory as a prologue to the production. Ultimately, however, he used only a fraction of Müller’s text in the prologue and spliced the remainder into the body of his adaptation. Thus Wilson and Müller are, in effect, coauthors of the final script, though the voices of the two artists surface in the text with more dissonance than congruity. The sections developed by Wilson...