New York

Abstract

I was one of the sleepy, bleary-eyed people who bundled into overcoats and ventured out of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and into the cold, sunny morning, after having seen the first of four performances of Robert Wilson’s latest theatre spectacular, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. The majority of the several hundred spectators who had entered the auditorium at 7 p.m. of the previous evening, fortified with box suppers .and thermos bottles of coffee (not to mention good intentions) had drifted away at various hours into the night, into the comfort of their beds. Some, who couldn’t get with the Wilson adventure, left early. The others, devotees of the avant-garde, persistent in their vigil, despite their determination to receive the full fourteen-hour long initiation into the Wilson experience, gave in at times to their drowsiness and allowed sleep to bathe refreshingly over them – their snores occasionally resounding through the auditorium and sawing through the silent threads of Wilson’s fantastic images as they were woven into a living tapestry and unfolded upon the stage. Sleep must be an associate of Wilson’s work; for at the frontier between sleep and non-sleep, where the human mind softens the hard edges of hours and minutes, one is much more willing to embrace Wilson’s extraordinary images and unusual sense of theatrical time. In this half-hallucinatory/half-trance state, exterior and interior images cross-fade. Wilson’s dreams mingle and intertwine with your own. Although I cannot report the effect of Wilson’s theatre piece on the other hundred or so spectators who greeted the dawn with Stalin and I cannot (I confess) recall with certainty the sequence of event or detail, I have experienced the recurrence of Wilson’s images in my dreams and occasionally in a momentary tableau which passes through my daily life.