Images in the Interstice: The Phenomenal Theater of Robert Wilson

Images in the Interstice: The Phenomenal Theater of Robert Wilson GORDON S. ARMSTRONG Iuse the kind of natural time in which it takes the sun to set, acloud to change, aday to dawn. I give you time to reflect, to meditate. . . . Igive you tUne and space in which to think.' Two decades of startlingly beautiful oneiric landscapes, elaborately calibrated lighting plots and multi-scrirnmed stage settings have not detracted from Robert Wilson's reputation as America's foremost experimenter in avant-garde drama. His reputation dates at least from the Paris production ofhis Deafman Glance at the Theatre de la Musique, 2 June '97'. On that date - or shortly thereafter Louis Aragon addressed a posthumous letter to Andre Breton, in praise of Robert Wilson's creation. The spectacle of Aragon's calculated public advertisement, proclaiming Wilson as the true heir to the surrealist revolutions ofthe 1920S, was published in LesLettresFrancaises.2 The movement that had faded in the 1930S with Breton's espousal of Marxism, and had lain quiescent for three decades, was reborn (in Aragon's eyes at least) in the collaborative works of Wilson, a trained architect who expanded the limits of the communicative act in the theater. The surrealist legacy that Wilson inherited - and adapted to his own purposes - lies somewhere in the interstice between consciousness and the unconscious. Louis Arata describes this interior landscape as "a realm of freedom for the mind and the body.,,3 Recent productions of Wilson's works tend to support this view. The 1984 revival of Einstein on the Beach prompted David Sterritt to describe the work as a marvel of "indelible imagery and transfixing rhythms" that carry the production "to the heights of theatrical splendor ... rarely matched in more conventional settings.'''' Other reviewers have been equally positive. Peter Goodman declared that Wilson's piece was "an extraordinary, seminal work of modem theater," while Mel Gussow, in his review in The New York Times, defined Wilson's art as "a theater of images - visual, aural, sculptural 572 GORDON S. ARMSTRONG and architectural.'" More recently, the 1985 production of segments of the CIVIL warS at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, evoked plaudits from a variety ofcritics. Time summarized the spectators' experience, describing the haunting imagery of CIVIL warS as "spare and elliptical, yet also brilliantly colorful and chillingly provocative; ... a radical concatenation of allusions."· However, Wilson's 1986 adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis on the A.R.T. stage has notreceived the same kind ofadulation. "Blinded by the light," stated one reviewer; "Hollow"; "Pointless and pretentious"; complained other newspaper critics.7 Even Mel Gussow, who had applauded Wilson's earlier achievements in the theater, felt compelled to offer frank advice: Though one certainly does not want to discourage Mr. Wilson's involvement with the classics, it must be said that his most visionary art has been with The Life and Times of Josef Stalin, Einstein on the Beach, and other imagistic historical theater of his own invention.8 Kevin Kelly went further in offering a perceptive comparison with the CIVIL warS segments of the previous year: The power of the CNIL warS came from the myths of war being treated as reality. The weakness in Alcesris comes from the reality of death being treated as myth.9 Certainly every creative artist should be permitted a latitude in success. In this instance, at least, the critics were unnecessarily harsh: Kelly's figure/ ground (reality/myth) analysis was anchored in parallel constructions, while Gussow's remarks dismissed the possibilities of the classics reborn too soon. But without doubt something in Wilson's process for creating a theater text had gone wrong. It is impossible to understand fully either the relationships of time and space or the reflexivity of images to consciousness in Wilson's works. Even the identification of a problem - as Kelly has shown - leads to no easy solutions, but some formulations can be suggested. Robert Wilson's use of time and space is deceptively simple. There is not time and space in which "to think" in the accepted sense of "thinking," for Wilson is - to both admirers and detractors - the great dreamer of our theater, and an...