Einstein on the Beach

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

There must be a God. Otherwise how would Robert Wilson get people to stop what they are doing to do nothing? Robert Wilson is like one of those guys who gets sick of city life and heads upstate where the pace is supposed to be slower. The classic Wilson style is to slow things down. For instance, his Berliner Ensemble production of The Three Penny Opera at BAM last year was Brecht at one quarter tempo. Einstein on the Beach had its first iteration at the Met back in ’76;  we are witnessing the classic Wilson palette in the current BAM revival in which the Philip Glass score is nestled amidst the freeze framed running figures, the innocence of the child mind (in this case a child cantilevered over the action and throwing paper planes), the Ebonics, in the form of a black judge who refers to Kalamazoooooooo, and the endless repetition of jibber jabber that makes sense and nonsense. There’s the famed narration written by Lucinda Childs,  “you know I was in a prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all the aisles and all these bathing caps you could buy with Fourth of July plumes on them,” or another that might sound familiar to ‘60’s vets “Harry Harrison from 6 to l0, Ron Lundy 10-2, Dan Ingram…” All of these repeated again and again. Einstein really only appears three times as a white haired violin soloist (played by the renowned violinist Jennifer Koh), as a young man on a train and the child throwing a paper plane, but Wilson’s style is relativity. To get slow motion in film you have to speed things up shooting more than 24 frames per second. On the stage repetition has a similar effect.  By repeating the same actions and language again and again, Wilson creates the impression of stasis (no matter how fast you repeat things or how insistent Glass’s score), in such a way that the audience’s pulse rate comes down. As he does this, the hands of a clock, projected onto one of the scrims, literally start to go backwards. You yawn, you get antsy and start wondering if Wilson and Glass aren’t pied pipers directing a great production of Emperor’s New Clothes, if they hasn’t Tartuffed you, if Wilson's tableaux vivants aren’t really tableau mordants. But you can’t stop thinking about what you’ve seen. The emperor may have lost his clothes, but he’s still finely attired in ideas.

Krapp's Last CD

“Went down to BAM to see Krapp. Heard box 3 spool 5. And just because it’s high art doesn’t mean that it’s not  crap. (sighs) Spool, stool, they’re all emetics. Quiddity refers to 'the real nature of a thing; the essence?' I said again that it made no sense continuing and she who was sitting next to me in the car assented particularly since we’d stopped for a red light at the corner of Ashland Place. Because of two headlights shining, she was squinting. Perhaps it isn’t a wonderful life and I lost the one opportunity I had, but I don’t want any ot it, for reasons I can’t disclose. I knew it was all going to be like silent film, man stripped down to the basics, a tramp slipping on a banana peel, our tramp (whose stage business was written by a one-time graduate of Trinity College, Dublin) making it crystal clear 'this is just a play and I’m just an actor since notice I refuse to step out of the limelight.' Like modern art, a painting’s just paint, an actor just mouths words and consciousness is disemBODIED, the supposedly integrated personality we presume to recognize in the mirror simply a delusion. John Hurt cradling that tape deck is holding on to what brains Krapp has left. Lucky Krapp has a tape to do the remembering for him, but why not a CD? Should be called Krapp’s Last Sound Byte or digital something or other. By the by, on the way to BAM I realized that Marina Abramovic and Robert Wilson must both have been deeply influenced by Krapp even before either had heard of it. Why? What are you saying? Because silence is not merely punctuation? Lucky I brought a banana.”

The Threepenny Opera

Brecht cut against his own intrinsic sentimentality by constantly breaking down the fourth wall and reminding us that all was fake, all was artifice, and the human condition was far too complex to tolerate the idealizations of catharsis. This is what is known as the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. Robert Wilson out-Verfremdungseffekts even Brecht in his current production of The Threepenny Opera at BAM. Firstly, it’s Wilson, so everything is slowed down. Secondly, the production is a virtual iconography party, from the scratching sounds of an old phonograph to Chaplinesque vaudevillian touches and sound effects that evoke the themes of ingestion and regurgitation that are so intrinsic to Brecht’s characterization of man as beast. The world is poor and man is shit. Food is the first thing. Morals follow. The words evoke the classic Brechtian theme of man as a thinking animal. The famed Theater de Lys production with Lotte Lenya that became a Manhattan institution spawned an LP that many baby boomers grew up listening to. One may question the extravagance of Wilson’s direction, which almost seems in competition with earlier interpretations, like the one at the de Lys, with their more intimate cacophonies. At the same time there are two things that really bring the crème to the surface. One is the performance by the Berliner Ensemble, which Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded. The other is Wilson’s mastery at creating a spectacle out of human consciousness. There is nothing like hearing The Threepenny Opera in German. Mack the Knife becomes Mackie Messer, and Stefan Kurt will probably turn out to be one of the great Macheaths.