Polar Bears, Lincoln on Stilts;‘the CIVIL warS,’ Robert Wilson's Hypnotic Collage
Thus Act III, Scene E, opens with a Civil War battlefield scene that might have come right out of Mathew Brady's tintypes, and the concluding Act IV Epilogue introduces the figure of Lincoln -- a woman on stilts raising her to 20-foot height, complete with beard and stovepipe hat. But in between, the imagery ranges from an itinerant, stylized family group to weird, unclassifiable apparitions to the recurrent personage of Frederick the Great. Frederick becomes, among other things, a symbol of the schizophrenic soul of the German nation, the Prussian monarch having been at once a purveyor of enlightenment and a brutal despot.
A description of the contents of the production is apt to sound, in print, like a chaotic jumble of unrelated fantasies. The haunting opening scene, with its tents, soldiers, muskets, campfire, mists, crickets and overlapped texts coming from multiple speakers, yields to others, which display the family seated around a table; a child building a Stonehenge out of toy bricks; a space missile traveling across the upper reaches of the stage and then descending to almost incinerate an older woman; a dance for two polar bears; Frederick on his deathbed, and later, shooting a dog with a pistol; a bizarre rendition of Schubert's "Erlko nig" by Frederick's mother as she munches bonbons and feeds her lap dog; and the Epilogue, in which Lincoln is joined by a screeching Snow Owl, an Earth Mother and a tattered King Lear cradling crumpled newspapers in his arms and bemoaning his dead Cordelia.
All this is folded within a multimedia cocoon -- the work of Wilson himself and such collaborators as East German playwright Heiner Mu ller, set designer Tom Kamm, costumer Yoshio Yabara, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, composers Hans Peter Kuhn, Michael Galasso, Philip Glass and others, and a battery of filmmakers and projectionists. The multiple role portrayals by the ART cast of eight principal actors and an ensemble of 18 are surrounded with layers of verbal text, sound, music, scrims, ramps, traps, visuals and props that make for a continuous, characteristically slow-moving and repetitive sensory web.
There are lapses and saggings, but mostly it's the genius of Wilson to orchestrate these elements into an integrated experience that, while only dimly explicable in rational terms, generates tremendous wonder, surprise and feeling. It's as if Wilson's eye burrows deeply into our unconscious store of memory and emotion, and uncovers astonishing connections that lurk there waiting to be switched on. It's the method of collage, heightened to an extraordinary revelatory power by an artist with a nearly infallible instinct for the reconciliation of opposites. As Robert Brustein, artistic director of ART, recently put it, Wilson "launches the theater into new dimensions of the unknown, propelling our imaginations into the expanding universe of art."