Robert Wilson and Fred Newman: A Dialogue on Politics and Therapy, Stillness and Vaudeville

Ed. note: The following remarks are excerpted from a dialogue between Robert Wilson and Fred Newman, moderated by Richard Schechner, sponsored by the Castillo Theatre at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice theatre on 11 February 2002.

SCHECHNER:

Who are these two men, and why are they engaging in a dialogue? This is not a question that can be answered easily or simply, and in fact I will not attempt to answer it. That is the function of the encounter that will follow my introduction. What I can do is outline some of the similarities and also point out some of the differences between these two men and their performances.

Robert Wilson is known to those who have followed the avantgarde, the opera, Western theatre, from at least the mid-1970s—and possibly earlier if you were privileged to see his very early work—through to the present. Wilson's work is known around the globe. In a certain sense, he has been a pioneer of globalization, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. It has not been possible to raise the money for his projects here in the United States, so the resources for the work have come from different parts of the world, the actors have come from different parts of the world. He constructs his works on several continents and shows them at various international venues, moving freely across national borders.

Wilson's work is sumptuous, expensive, grand in several senses, and yet the sources of his work, especially if one traces it back to its beginnings in the 1960s and the early '70s, are in psycho- and physical therapy, the enabling of worldviews that up to that point had been ignored or repressed. In his workshops and in such pieces as Deafman Glance [1970], A Letter for Queen Victoria [1974], and Einstein on the Beach [1976], Wilson collaborated with differently abled young artists such as Raymond Andrews and Christopher Knowles, people who were deaf, autistic—not ordinary. He gave them a voice, expression, a place, dignity.

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Fred Newman and Robert Wilson engage in a "director's dialogue" at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Theatre in February 2002. (Photo by David Nackman)

Later in his career, Wilson worked with Heiner Müller, and Wilson's 1986 production at NYU of Müller's Hamletmachine, the American premiere of that work, remains in my memory the finest rendition I've seen of this difficult, many-faceted work. Wilson has collaborated with many world-class artists, including Philip Glass, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, and Jessye Norman. Although often mounting his own works, Wilson has also staged classics of modern Western drama, such as Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken [1991] and Strindberg's Dream Play [1998]. He continues to work in several genres: theatre, opera, and the visual arts.

Fred Newman's work is produced on an altogether different scale, inside the intimate spaces of the Castillo Theatre on Greenwich Street here in Manhattan. In addition to staging his own plays, Newman has directed Heiner Müller, who may, because of his close connection to both directors, be considered an absent participant in this evening's conversation. Newman has collaborated with choreographer Bill T. Jones [Requiem for Communism, 1993], and in 2000 he staged a new interpretation of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which I found extremely interesting.

Newman's productions are not dreamscapes or visual masterpieces as Wilson's works often are, but rather a kind of latter-day realism, focused on the more ordinary, if also the politically and socially challenging, interactions of everyday life. But from my perspective, even more important than Newman's particular theatrical work is the wide-ranging performance of the Castillo Theatre taken as a whole. If Wilson has involved, used, and depended upon numerous collaborators and producers, many of them significant artists in their own right, sometimes people of wealth and patrons of the arts in the classical sense, Newman has...