Structure

Throughout his Stalin notebooks, Wilson obsessively redrew the structure of its seven acts, most often arranging them in an S or spiral shape. His challenge was to organize time nonlinearly, for this was a non-narrative play running in near slow-motion all night long.

His solution was characteristically clear. Picturing act 4 (the forest) as the pivot and reflecting point of the play, he mapped the other acts onto each other in mirror reflection. The temple of act 5 evoked the cave of act 3, the bedroom of act 6 matched the drawing room of act 2, and the final planet landscape looked all the way back to the beach of the opening.

Also, of course, Watson/Crick’s DNA double-helix.

S is for “Stalin,” but it conjures up other visual associations as well. The doubling-back spiral is reminiscent of the yin-yang symbol of ancient China, which certainly suits the duality of the play, with its mirrored acts and doubled Stalins. But Wilson pursued a different visual analogy, often sketching the spiral as a solar system: the acts are planets set in orbit around the center, and the entr’actes orbit those planets in turn. The structural vastness of Stalin made a dramatic cosmology unique to Wilson’s early theater.

 

Chairs

Chairs are everywhere in Wilson – in his notebooks, sculptures, art collection, and stage. These paired Stalin chairs occupied the central act of that play. They embodied the duality Wilson saw in the Russian dictator, who was said to have kept two apartments in Moscow, each furnished identically right down to the same large armchairs draped with the same white sheets. Onstage, two Stalins came to sit in those chairs – one male (Wilson), the other female (Cindy Lubar) – both dressed in white and both presiding over the poisoning of Stalin’s wife.

In many of the Stalin notebook drawings, a circle cuts into the right-hand chair. In the play, this was a large cut-out of a circular saw-blade, but seen in the notebooks it’s so strikingly similar to the spiral described above that one quickly sees the connection: for the play is indeed cut in half at its center.

Elsewhere in Stalin chairs play other roles. A suspended chair slowly sinks from ceiling to floor from acts 1 to 3, acting as a kind of clock. In the next act, a bench, perhaps from an old schoolroom, rises above the forest to give the deaf-mute boy (Raymond Andrews) a perch from which to survey the scene – the Deafman Glance that was the title of the famous earlier production here incorporated into Stalin.

Virtually every Wilson production has had an emblematic chair. The Overture Chair, mounted on a platform in KA MOUNTAIN; the low-slung Queen Victoria Chairs, with lights embedded in their feet; and the tall Einstein Chairs, made from plumbing pipes because Einstein once talked of being a plumber rather than a physicist.

 

Language

“Silent operas ” are what the French called Wilson’s productions when they first encountered and acclaimed them, a designation as readily adapted (even by Wilson) as it was misleading.

If Wilson’s work before Queen Victoria lacked dialogue, it had started to make music (if at first as noise) and was learning to talk (if at first as monologue). In those days what fascinated Wilson and certain of his collaborators was the decomposition of words into basic elements, as if words were molecules whose atoms they could rearrange in a kind of verbal alchemy. Paul Schmidt has marveled that the word THERE, repeated by Wilson in both spoken and written forms, subdivides so cleanly: THE HE HER HERE ERE RE. That this resulting chain of sounds should evoke a stammer should come as no surprise, since Wilson himself suffered from stammering when he was young.

In Stalin, a chorus of heads protruding from the fore-stage intoned long chains of recombined words and syllables. The notebook fragment pictured above typifies this kind of choral text. Radiating out from the core element of OR came the word ORGONE, for example, a term invented by the half-mad post-Freudian psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, whose theories made sense in the still drugged-out times of the early 1970s, at least in downtown Manhattan. Orgones were particles of energy said to penetrate the universe, and the orgone box (sketched by Wilson on the same notebook page) could be built and stood in as if in a shower stall, where a concentrated rain of orgones could revitalize one’s orgiastic and psychic energies.

DOR OR ORGONE — this at the level of syllables and words. Also in Stalin, but up at the level of words and phrases, was Cindy Lubar’s electrifying possession by voices and non sequitors You see what I did was to revamp the pineal movement… This kind of linguistic work certainly prepared Wilson for his later encounter with Christopher Knowles, the autistic boy whose homemade cassettes of spliced text soon put him at the center of Wilson’s theater, most prominently in Queen Victoria, a play over-run by rapid-fire dialogue.

Though as a director Wilson has moved on to work with conventional theater dialogue (including Ibsen and Büchner), he often returns to these earlier investigations (especially in his three stagings of Gertrude Stein) and continues to collaborate with Knowles (at present for DDD3, to mark the end of the millenium).

 

Byrdwoman

The Byrdwoman is a recurring figure in Wilson — the tall remote unreadable woman, standing straight in her long black Victorian dress with its high sleeves, giving the effect of an erect raven. She appears in the single most famous scene of Wilson’s work, the Overture to Deafman Glance, where she moves in extreme slow motion, first pouring milk for a boy, then stabbing him to death — then repeating the sequence with a girl.

The enigma of the Byrdwoman is hard to penetrate. “I never knew who she was,” says Wilson, “whether she was a priest or a father or a mother or a boy, a girl, an angel of death…” The centrality of the Byrdwoman sequence for Wilson is borne out by the sheer number of times that he has enacted it — directing Sheryl Sutton in that role many times over, not only on the stage, but also in several film and video realizations. That the figure is a kind of female alter ego for Wilson is attested to by his having repeatedly performed it himself — in drag and even in blackface for some solos.

Wilson connects the Byrdwoman to his interest in Daniel Stern’s clinical observations of mothers and their infants. Slow motion studies revealed some mothers to be alternately embracing and rejecting their babies at split-second intervals. From this, Wilson concluded that the ambivalence and complexity of people’s interactions can only be seen when time is brought to a near standstill. Which is what he began doing on the stage.

 

Stage pictures

Much as the S of Stalin suggested its shape in time, so the title A Letter for Queen Victoria gave Wilson the composition of its stage.

Picturing the back of an envelope, with the arrangement of triangles formed by its intersecting flap and seams, he organized the stage pictures of Victoria accordingly, as can be seen above. Not only did the actors, décor, and light obey this scheme, but so did the text, which was treated geometrically and with the peculiar slant of Christopher Knowles’ mastery of word forms. This was clear from the start of the production, for the main drop was composed of words arrayed in this envelope formation. The end of the play also took its cue from Knowles, whose phrase “the angle of the thing angling” inspired Wilson to tilt the entire stage picture on an angle.

Victoria — with its stiff gentlemen, tightly costumed ladies, and ordered interiors — again indulged Wilson’s fascination with the Victorian era. But the production actually bade farewell not only to the band of Byrd Hoffman actors with whom Wilson had created his spectacular early work, but also to the stage mechanisms that Wilson had taken from the 19th century. The peculiar genius of Wilson’s early work was to have put all the traditional elements of the proscenium stage at the service of a non-narrative, non-linear, avant-garde vision. The huge illusionistic backdrops and the crowded props of the early productions – stunningly designed by Fred Kolo – gave the stage the weight of an earlier era. Wilson’s early vision was more that of a cowboy Surrealist rummaging through the past than the elegant minimalist he was soon to become.

Victoria signaled a complete change in approach; by Einstein on the Beach it was complete. Now the stage pictures were studies in geometry, as carefully composed for the eye as any graphic design or painting.

 

Light

Today Wilson is perhaps most influential for his having made light as important an element of the stage as any other. No longer used merely to highlight key actions or to create background atmosphere, “light is an actor,” as he puts it. This was true in this famous scene of Einstein: 18 minutes focused entirely on a bar of light moving from a horizontal to a vertical position.

This dematerialization of the stage has allowed Wilson ever more precise and elegant compositions, which have come to dominate his theatrical vision. The uproar at the Metropolitan Opera over Wilson’s production of Lohengrin came from his having replaced nearly all the traditional Wagnerian backdrops and décor with pure bars of light, whose slow and abstract development provided the visual counterpoint to the arias.