Robert Wilson’s Shakespearean "Cabaret"

The Brooklyn Academy of Music and Robert Wilson have had a long and storied history. The cross pollination has been benefit to both. Wilson’s particular brand of modernism, a mixture of dance and surrealist esthetics, a tableau vivant of hyperbolic morphology that sometimes looks like a Magritte come to life has left it’s brand  on the Gilman opera house and the whole BAM enterprise and naturally Wilson has become an almost mythic presence in the world of performance art. He visited Freud (The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud), Stalin (The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin), Einstein (Einstein on the Beach) and most recently in collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble began to employ his pataphysics on a classic of the modern theater, in a memorably post-modern Threepenny Opera. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Wilson has rejoined the Berliner Ensemble in bringing Shakespeare to BAM in the form of a production of the sonnets--originally staged in 2009. Here the androgynous homoerotic nature of the poetry is fully vented with all the female roles played by men. Rylancing could be the term applied to this approach to Shakespeare, which was, incidentally,  the way the Elizabethans did it. Jurgen Holtz who appeared in Threepenny presides over the current production as a Queen Elizabeth who bears a keen resemblance to Bert Lahr's cowardly lion. Wilson starts with Sonnet 43, "When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,” which would have segued beautifully into his obsession with the senses (a la Deafman Glance). But the production is more Catholic in spirit loading on the Shakespearean conceits to the point where they are in direct conflict with the director’s esthetic. While the mind is being stimulated by the complexity of the word play, Wilson employs his signature technique of slowing down the action. It’s like oil and water with the actual Shakespeare ultimately functioning merely as lyrics for Rufus Wainwright’s music—which, in this context, devolves into an acquired taste. The Berliner Ensemble actors in drag singing Shakespeare with Brechtian mannerisms end up creating a distinctly Weimar effect. Wilson’s intention may have been to tackle classics like Sonnet 29, "When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s Eyes,” but he’s ended up with something that’s reminiscent of Cabaret.

Boredom

Boredom is an unfairly maligned emotion. Inspiration, which shares some qualities of the sugar high, is what most artists claim they seek while enthrallment is what makes most readers buy books or theater tickets —either enthrallment  (Fifty Shades of Grey) or edification (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Boredom is certainly not what the potential lover seeks of his beloved. However caveat emptor, passion is like madness, a form of idealization that’s nature’s way of facilitating biological urges amidst the shoals of consciousness. Similarly, catharsis which produces enchantment and enthrallment can be delusory and manipulative, Aristotle’s Poetics notwithstanding. Boredom is less tolerated today then it was in the era of Edith Wharton and Henry James or even later in the high modernism or post-modernism of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Both the way in which James reticulated prose captured states of being and the way in which Cunningham and Cage sought to redefine the forms they employed required some degree of work on the part of their audience and the result in the case of Cage, in particular, could be intentionally boring. Today, life is moving so fast, there is no time for boredom. Posts come and go on Facebook like the women in T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “talking of Michelangelo.” How prescient Eliot was about esthetics evolving into creative gossip! But count to a hundred or maybe a thousand before you lose patience with people or artworks. When Waiting For Godot had its US premiere in Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse back in l956, with Bert Lahr as Estragon, the audience was hardly enchanted. Now Beckett’s play is part of the canon, but is it boring to watch? And what about Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which not very much happens, or Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin which went on for 12 hours?