"Einstein on the Beach"
by Dale Harris
By common consent the highlight of this year's
Avignon festival was Einstein on the Beach, a
four-and-a-half-hour theater piece created by Robert
Wilson, working for the first time in close collaboration
with a composer, Philip Glass. Though all of Wilson's
previous works (e.g., A Letter for Queen Victoria, The
Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The $ Value of Man) have
been called "operas," Einstein is actually the first in
which music is a constituent element - and music, moreover,
by an important contemporary composer. Einstein, however,
is no more an opera in the usual sense of the term than
its predecessors. By "opera" I suspect that Wilson simply
means a piece for the stage released from the confines of
a single genre - neither play nor ballet, spectacle nor
happening, but a mixture of diverse theatrical forms.
In now adding virtually continuous music Wilson
has not so much changed the essential nature of his work
as realized it more fully. Largely because of the music,
Einstein is the most dreamlike and uninhibiting of
Wilson's pieces. Glass's forces consist of a chorus of
twelve (who sing nothing but numbers and solfege syllables)
and an orchestra of eight players (two soprano saxophones,
doubling with two flutes; a tenor saxophone; three electric
organs; and a solo violin) together with a soprano voice
used instrumentally. All the music is reiterative and
rhythmically complex, forcing itself upon the listener's
attention with such assurance - and such beauty of
texture - that one quickly capitulates to its hypnotic
power.
The surrender
In doing so, one is at the same time surrendering
to Wilson's demands: upon our sympathy, our imagination,
and particularly our patience. In Einstein, as in all of
Wilson's oeuvre, there is hardly anything that the ordinary
theatergoer would recognize as dramatic action. During the
opening scene Lucinda Childs, a wonderful dancer who plays
an important role in Einstein, and Sheryl Sutton sit at
desks for ten minutes, quietly counting off a series of
numbers. In the next scene Childs does nothing but march
back and forth across the stage over and over again. Later
on she repeats a great many times a short monologue about
seeing some bathing caps in an air-conditioned supermarket.
Wilson's intention here and in his use of stasis or
immensely slow movements is to annihilate clock time for
us and replace it with a sense of metaphysical transcendence.
Thus a little boy perches atop a tall tower throughout one
scene, playing with a kind of lucite puzzle and every so
often launching paper airplanes; a man and a woan stand on
the caboose of a train for an entire scene; Sheryl Sutton
walks past as if projected by a slow motion camera.
As for the title character, several Einstein figures
appear during the evening. One of them is Robert Brown who,
made up to look like Einstein as an old man and with a spotlight
turned on him in the orchestra pit, plays a series of brilliant,
fast violin solos. Another Einstein figure, much younger,
is simply associated with various symbols of science. Yet
another writes what might be mathematical formulae on an
imaginary blackboard. As this suggests, Einstein is partly
about science. Two dance episodes take place in a field over
which a space ship slowly travels and the penultimate scene
is set inside a space ship on a vast cosmic journey (twice we
are given glimpses of the tiny craft moving through the heavens).
Subjects & images
But Einstein is also about justice (there are two
major courtroom scenes), dreams (a vast bed is placed directly
before the judges' bench, as if imagination itself is on
trial), imprisonment and outlawry (Lucinda Childs turns into
a Patty Hearst-like figure, shedding what could be interpreted
as debutante's clothes for guerilla outfit, complete with
machine gun). There are also trains, a gyroscope, a bus, a
long discourse about Paris spoken in heavily accented French
over a loudspeaker by a seventy-seven-year-old black actor,
Samuel M. Johnson, and a shorter one by him in the very last
scene that, to the accompaniment of a simple organ pedal
point, affirms with moving directness the need for human love.
The succession of dreamlike images that make up
Einstein is beautifully realized. Wilson began his carees as
an architect and Einstein is imbued with his vividly personal
sense of space and design: the perspective view of a train
is linked to that of a building; the bus takes on the aspect
of a space ship, and so forth. The bed in the courtroom, on
which Lucinda Childs as the accused at one point reclines,
later on lights up from within, moves around the stage and
is slowly raised until it stands horizontal before us like
some mysterious totem, glowing in the surrounding darkness
as if with magical energy.
Such visions, unconnected by logic or sequential
narrative, make a great and disturbing impact upon one's
imagination. Yet at the same time they bring illumination
to it. Wilson, it must be emphasized, has not let his
unconscious run wild. Like any serious artist he has both
freed it and brought it under control. Einstein is a very
carefully structured piece of work, which though performed
continuously, consists of four acts, together with five
so-called "kneeplays" (because they act as joints between
the major scenes) made up of three interludes after Acts 1,
2 and 3, a Prologue, and an Epilogue. In this case, as so
often, structure equals clarity and focus. Though it is
impossible to say what Einstein is "about," it is, so far
as I'm concerned, impossible to deny its power, its ability
to awaken understanding about what is usually concealed
from us, and help us face up to what we usually avoid. It
is the achievement of Wilson and Glass to have made the
theater a place of profound self-confrontation.
(
geocities.com/vienna)