Ibsen Lite: Robert Wilson's When We Dead Awaken

I don't like most of Ibsen's plays. Ibsen explains too much. But When We Dead Awaken is different. It's so mysterious.

—Robert Wilson

In the late 1980s, Robert Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conferred with Robert Wilson about choosing a text for Wilson's second adaptation for the ART; his previous production had been Euripides's Alcestis in 1986. "What's interesting," Brustein wrote, "is his growing attraction to texts, which we will do our best to further in our next production" (Foreword xi).

Wilson's "growing attraction to texts" was a recent development. "Theatre doesn't live in words," Wilson maintains. "It lives in space" (qtd. in Holmberg 122).¹ Wilson's first signature work, Deafman Glance (1970), is wordless, and, although his most famous work, Einstein on the Beach (1976), on which he collaborated with Philip Glass, has some words, "You don't have to listen to [them] because [they] don't mean anything" (Wilson, qtd. in Shyer xv). Trained as a painter and an architect, and an avid anti-Aristotelian, Wilson is least interested in the element Aristotle deemed drama's most important – action – and most interested in what Aristotle deemed the least: spectacle. Lacking characters and plot in any traditional sense, Wilson's works are operatic spectacles of mixed media, dominated by striking visual images achieved by a myriad of highly technical lighting effects. "Light is the most important part of theatre," Wilson insists. ". . . . I build, I compose with light. Light is a magic wand" (qtd. in Holmberg 121). Wilson's spectacles are perhaps best thought of as collages, "vast assemblages," writes Laurence Shyer, "which he creates out of initially unrelated images, actions and activities, sounds and words" (xvii).

Shyer suggests that Wilson turned to directing texts as a result of his work with the playwright Heiner Müller, who provided Wilson with the text for his German theCIVILwarS (1984) and whose play Hamletmachine Wilson directed in 1986. Wilson threw out eighty per cent of Müller's textual material for theCIVILwarS, and Hamletmachine is a text of only six pages; still, Shyer writes, working with a playwright, and especially a playwright who came out of a strong intellectual tradition, made Wilson begin to question whether his earlier works might not be merely "pretty pictures" (133). Müller himself says that texts provided Wilson with a way to avoid the great danger of his kind of theatre: "a hollow frame – just design" (qtd. in Shyer 134).

After Müller's Hamletmachine, Wilson went on to direct two operas, Richard Strauss's Salomé, in 1987, and Giacomo Manzoni's Doctor Faustus, in 1989, both at La Scala; a performance based on Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, in 1989, at the Schaubühne; and King Lear, in 1990, at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus. The same year, Brustein and Wilson settled on Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken for Wilson's second ART production and staged it in the spring of 1991.

Wilson dislikes and refuses categorization but has always insisted on the revolutionary nature of his work. In an interview conducted when When We Dead Awaken opened, he explained that the "special function" of the artist was to "take things from one context, [and] put them together in a different context," to "destroy codes" in order to "make a new language, a new order . . .. Once language is discernible, we destroy it and make a new one" (Susman). John Conklin, who worked closely with Wilson as his co-set designer for When We Dead Awaken, has suggested the term "alternate reality" for Wilson's reworkings of others' texts (3).

The notion of adaptation as a thoroughgoing refashioning of the original is a central concept of contemporary performance theatre. Laurence Romero, who greatly admires Wilson's When We Dead Awaken, has called it nothing less than

a casebook for the transformation of traditional script to performance text: the reduction of language to skeletal format, much of it retained to ironic or parodic ends, the integration, if not invasion, of a substantial subtext of light, sound, and...