Theater: Wilson's ‘Rome’ Segment in Brooklyn
For one thing, there's a language barrier. Much of the text is sung in Latin and Italian, and to be perfectly blunt, this stuff is hard to figure out even when it's in English. Given the formality and remoteness of Mr. Wilson's style, it seems foolish to distance the audience even further by making so much of the text not merely incomprehensible, but inaccessible as well. (There was some German in the Cologne section that was shown in Cambridge, but even drama critics are more familiar with Goethe's "Erlkoenig" than they are with Seneca.)
When the text is comprehensible, it becomes quite apparent that these scenes depend upon the ones that came before, the ones we haven't seen, unless we've been to Cambridge and Rotterdam and Tokyo and Lyon. The refrain that crops up again and again, "It must have been a terrible war," would resonate more deeply if we'd just experienced it.
Similarly, the beautiful description, by a contemporary witness, of Lee's solitary ride to Appomattox would carry more emotional weight if it didn't come up simultaneously with the general's first appearance on the stage. The feeling of aftermath, of elegy, that imbues so much of this section is probably just right at the end of 12 hours of civil wars. As a free-standing two-and-a-half hour piece, Act V often seems skimpy.
If it doesn't quite meet our expectations on an emotional level until the very last scene, Act V also lacks the pageantry that could help us forget them. The work is, of course, beautiful to look at. But that "of course" is Mr. Wilson's undoing. He has led us to expect the beautiful as a matter of course, and we demand more and more of him. We want to be made breathless, as we were when we first glimpsed his white tents arrayed on the stage in Cambridge, or when we watched two giant bears doing a pas de deux.
The whimsy that animated those bears, and the dancing stacks of baskets in "The Knee Plays" seems to have gone astray in the Rome section. The closest thing here is the ballet, in which red-shirted followers of Garibaldi cavort with Hopi Indians. But the sequence is hopelessly flat, due in large part to Ulysses Dove's choreographic cliches. Mr. Wilson himself has succumbed to cliche in his treatment of Garibaldi: The great leader sits in a box and watches the stage, then he sings an aria, then he watches again. He seems an afterthought.
But even in the dismal Garibaldi scene, there's a hint of the glorious finish to come. It's embedded in the stage set, naturally enough. The program tells us that it's a suspension bridge between two spaceships, but one look tells us that it's simply Mr. Wilson's elegant version of the Brooklyn Bridge. Another portent of the finale comes in the Robert E. Lee scene, when a scrim painted with the clipped hedges and trimmed trees of a formal garden slides by silently. If this arboreal cortege stands for the civilization that has immolated itself in war, the parade of trees that follows, in the final scene, is a botanical United Nations, a lush reminder that although a tree is best measured when it is down, it thrives only while it is up.