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chapter five Einstein on the Beach it has long been fashionable to refer to the Broadway theater as the fabulous invalid—perpetually sick with a crippling illness that never kills it. Anyone with theatergoing experience not con‹ned to the commercial, however, knows that the truly fabulous invalid for most of the past hundred years has been the avant-garde theater. Decade after decade from the 1890s on, the succession of Euro-American avant-garde movements performed their signature act of rising miraculously from the deathbed of a predecessor , ›ush with rejuvenating rage at outdated practices and principles and hell-bent on implementing better ones. In retrospect, it is astonishing that any utopian ideals survived those waves of ideological parricide, yet a few managed to do so. Two in particular have come down to us fairly intact, enduring through two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism and Fascism , the rise of the media and information age, and innumerable other jarring shifts in style, taste, behavior, mores, and technology. These are the Wagnerian dream of uniting the separate arts (music, poetry, dance, and painting) in a monumental, communally healing “total theater” synthesis or Gesamtkunstwerk, and the kindred symbolist-surrealist-Artaudian dream of liberating theater from the tyrannical dominion of language. Skeptics about these idealisms have never been hard to ‹nd. Igor Stravinsky once sniffed that “sound minds never believed in the paradise of the Synthesis of the Arts.”1 Bertolt Brecht dismissed the ideal as“witchcraft” whose likeliest result was “sordid intoxication.”2 And Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that the symbolist utopia, the “theater of silence,” really amounted to “panverbalism, the total conquest of the theatrical world by the word,” as words ended up de‹ning the nature of everything around them, including the empty spaces.3 These idealisms nevertheless pervaded theatrical inno97 vation throughout the twentieth century. They were basic animating forces for artists and groups as diverse as Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Hugo Ball, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Sergei Diaghilev, Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Antonin Artaud, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Allan Kaprow, the Living Theater, the Judson Poet’s Theater, and Jerzy Grotowski. By the time I began attending experimental theater in the early 1980s, however , passionate enthusiasm for them had for the most part faded to nostalgic whispers and wishes. The only active theater-maker then who still carried a torch in any pure way for both “total theater” and the theatrical transcendence of language was Robert Wilson, and he was something of a rumor or myth to young Americans because his work appeared almost exclusively in Europe. In December 1984, when I saw my ‹rst Wilson piece—Einstein on the Beach in its ‹rst revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House—he had not premiered a new piece in the United States in eight years. That evening destroyed a number of old shibboleths for me. It has lived vividly in my memory through two and a half decades, not least because it is still the only theater work I have seen that sustained my interest and attention over a marathon length of time without a substantial text. Einstein on the Beach was originally a product of an earlier, teeming New York avant-garde milieu. In the early 1970s, Wilson was a downtown New York ‹xture and something of a doyen of marathon theater, having done several of his signature, slow-moving, image-centered pieces at BAM, with lengths up to twelve hours. Einstein was a ‹ve-hour, uninterrupted “portrait opera” by Wilson and Philip Glass that premiered in Avignon in 1976, toured Europe that summer to ecstatic reviews, and ended with two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met performances were an extremely unlikely coup for these experimental artists. No such aggressively unconventional, staunchly countercultural production had yet scaled the walls of that citadel of mainstream culture, and the resultant media blitz and ‹erce competition for tickets—as well as the force of the show itself—ensured its enshrinement as a legend. In 1984, BAM brought the work back for twelve performances, substantially the same, we were told, except for a change of choreographer: Lucinda Childs replaced Andrew DeGroat. I attended with a gang of skeptical graduate-school cronies, all of us mistrustful of both the play’s legend and the sticky reverence behind the Wilson myth. Many of us were also rueful at having missed the golden era 98 great lengths [3.137.192.3] Project MUSE...

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