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........ I. N' BERLIN Robert Wilson's Tale of Two Cities Photos by Ruth Walz The good thing about working in Germany is that the city of Berlin would commission an American to do a production on the scale of this one. The city of New York couldn't do it and wouldn't do it for an American, much less a foreigner. And I did like working with the professional actors, that went very well. Also, I was able to paint the decor myself, working in the shops with painters there which I couldn't do here. And I worked with a highly professional team of costume designers, scene painters, so on. Other things were difficult. The theatre was too small and we had to completely rebuild the space to make a proscenium theatre out of a non-proscenium space. And the technical aspect of the work was the weakest, which is where you'd expect the Germans to be strongest. Part of the problem was that there was no technical director on the project from the beginning. Peter Stein's last play was over a month late in opening because of technical problems, so my play was delayed because they couldn't start any technical work. The one area in which they thought I was extravagant, and I was more extravagant than I've ever been, was in lighting. I had three and a half weeks of lighting rehearsals. I did things like paint a white line on a hand, then light one side with a warm light and the other with a cold 3 DEATH DESTRUCTION & DETROIT An Opera with Music in 2 Acts. A Love Story in 16 Scenes. By Robert Wilson; Music: Alan Lloyd. Presented at the Schaubiihne am Halleschen Ufer in Berlin; February, 1979. Prologue, THE GARDEN WALL light. When the man is standing there in the beginning holding a rake, that's how the hand is lit and painted. All that was a bit much for them because Stein lights his shows at night without the actors, and I had all the actors there with the make-up artists and costumes for three and a half weeks setting up everything very carefully. I don't know anyone else who's doing that in theatre. Visconti did beautiful lighting at one time I think, but no one now. In still photography, there's Horst. He spends three hours to light a face with three lamps. I watched him work when he photographed Lucinda and I for Patio, and I couldn't believe he really spends all that time moving lights around. Also, I took a lot of stuff from Speer's designs. That lighting in Scene 9 came from this photograph of his Nuremburg staging. There are eighty lights on the floor, parallel beams that point straight up. It makes a wall of light. Most of Stein's company is in one age range, so I took only four members of the theatre's company, although one had a principal part. And I took Philippe Chemin from Paris. Then I found old cabaret performers , very old ones, and people from the street, like this young girl, twelve or thirteen years old, who had never performed before. We put together a company of nineteen people, then started working. The first thing I did was direct the whole thing very quickly in one or two days, which is unusual for them. Then I broke it down and started doing parts and detailing them. But once a week I would do the whole piece. The actors found that difficult. Each week, I had an open rehearsal to which people could come, because some of the people hadn't performed before and they could get used to people watching them. Scene 3, THE CITY 2G: never be so foolish as to go up in a plane without a parachute they know? did they remember that? what brave men they were what heroes they had no guarantee that they would for sure get back to earth they think I knew a great deal more than I did that I had a great deal more influence that I did have but...

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