"Einstein on the Beach"
by Dale Harris

	By common consent the highlight of this year's 
Avignon festival was Einstein on the Beach, a 
four-and-a-half-hour theater piece created by Robert 
Wilson, working for the first time in close collaboration 
with a composer, Philip Glass. Though all of Wilson's 
previous works (e.g., A Letter for Queen Victoria, The 
Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The $ Value of Man) have 
been called "operas," Einstein is actually the first in 
which music is a constituent element - and music, moreover, 
by an important contemporary composer. Einstein, however, 
is no more an opera in the usual sense of the term than 
its predecessors. By "opera" I suspect that Wilson simply 
means a piece for the stage released from the confines of 
a single genre - neither play nor ballet, spectacle nor 
happening, but a mixture of diverse theatrical forms. 
	
	In now adding virtually continuous music Wilson 
has not so much changed the essential nature of his work 
as realized it more fully. Largely because of the music, 
Einstein is the most dreamlike and uninhibiting of 
Wilson's pieces. Glass's forces consist of a chorus of 
twelve (who sing nothing but numbers and solfege syllables) 
and an orchestra of eight players (two soprano saxophones, 
doubling with two flutes; a tenor saxophone; three electric 
organs; and a solo violin) together with a soprano voice 
used instrumentally. All the music is reiterative and 
rhythmically complex, forcing itself upon the listener's 
attention with such assurance - and such beauty of 
texture - that one quickly capitulates to its hypnotic 
power.

The surrender

	In doing so, one is at the same time surrendering 
to Wilson's demands: upon our sympathy, our imagination, 
and particularly our patience. In Einstein, as in all of 
Wilson's oeuvre, there is hardly anything that the ordinary 
theatergoer would recognize as dramatic action. During the 
opening scene Lucinda Childs, a wonderful dancer who plays 
an important role in Einstein, and Sheryl Sutton sit at 
desks for ten minutes, quietly counting off a series of 
numbers. In the next scene Childs does nothing but march 
back and forth across the stage over and over again. Later 
on she repeats a great many times a short monologue about 
seeing some bathing caps in an air-conditioned supermarket. 
Wilson's intention here and in his use of stasis or 
immensely slow movements is to annihilate clock time for 
us and replace it with a sense of metaphysical transcendence. 
Thus a little boy perches atop a tall tower throughout one 
scene, playing with a kind of lucite puzzle and every so 
often launching paper airplanes; a man and a woan stand on 
the caboose of a train for an entire scene; Sheryl Sutton 
walks past as if projected by a slow motion camera. 
	
	As for the title character, several Einstein figures 
appear during the evening. One of them is Robert Brown who, 
made up to look like Einstein as an old man and with a spotlight 
turned on him in the orchestra pit, plays a series of brilliant, 
fast violin solos. Another Einstein figure, much younger, 
is simply associated with various symbols of science. Yet 
another writes what might be mathematical formulae on an 
imaginary blackboard. As this suggests, Einstein is partly 
about science. Two dance episodes take place in a field over 
which a space ship slowly travels and the penultimate scene 
is set inside a space ship on a vast cosmic journey (twice we 
are given glimpses of the tiny craft moving through the heavens).

Subjects & images

	But Einstein is also about justice (there are two 
major courtroom scenes), dreams (a vast bed is placed directly 
before the judges' bench, as if imagination itself is on 
trial), imprisonment and outlawry (Lucinda Childs turns into 
a Patty Hearst-like figure, shedding what could be interpreted 
as debutante's clothes for guerilla outfit, complete with 
machine gun). There are also trains, a gyroscope, a bus, a 
long discourse about Paris spoken in heavily accented French 
over a loudspeaker by a seventy-seven-year-old black actor, 
Samuel M. Johnson, and a shorter one by him in the very last 
scene that, to the accompaniment of a simple organ pedal 
point, affirms with moving directness the need for human love.
	
	The succession of dreamlike images that make up 
Einstein is beautifully realized. Wilson began his carees as 
an architect and Einstein is imbued with his vividly personal 
sense of space and design: the perspective view of a train 
is linked to that of a building; the bus takes on the aspect 
of a space ship, and so forth. The bed in the courtroom, on 
which Lucinda Childs as the accused at one point reclines, 
later on lights up from within, moves around the stage and 
is slowly raised until it stands horizontal before us like 
some mysterious totem, glowing in the surrounding darkness 
as if with magical energy. 
	
	Such visions, unconnected by logic or sequential 
narrative, make a great and disturbing impact upon one's 
imagination. Yet at the same time they bring illumination 
to it. Wilson, it must be emphasized, has not let his 
unconscious run wild. Like any serious artist he has both 
freed it and brought it under control. Einstein is a very 
carefully structured piece of work, which though performed 
continuously, consists of four acts, together with five 
so-called "kneeplays" (because they act as joints between 
the major scenes) made up of three interludes after Acts 1, 
2 and 3, a Prologue, and an Epilogue. In this case, as so 
often, structure equals clarity and focus. Though it is 
impossible to say what Einstein is "about," it is, so far 
as I'm concerned, impossible to deny its power, its ability 
to awaken understanding about what is usually concealed 
from us, and help us face up to what we usually avoid. It 
is the achievement of Wilson and Glass to have made the 
theater a place of profound self-confrontation.