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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/arts/music/robert-wilson-theater.html

Robert Wilson Expanded Our Sense of Theatrical Possibility

Wilson, who died this week at 83, created works of otherworldly dreaminess that were also deeply human.

By Zachary Woolfe
Aug. 1, 2025, 10:26 a.m. ET
Robert WilsonrCOs productions floated into theaters and opera houses like visitors from another planet.

Most audiences, particularly in the United States, were rCo and still are rCo used to realistic theater, with clear settings, plots and characters. For
60 years, Wilson, who died on Thursday at 83, infuriated some and inspired many others by abandoning conventional narrative and conceiving, directing
and designing works that were closer to long, enigmatic poems.

WilsonrCOs style was glacial in its pace. Very little would happen very slowly. His scenery was minimal, yet the backdrops glowed with blue light;
the effect was spare yet lush. The performersrCO faces were often whitened with makeup, like Japanese Noh actors, clowns or mimes. Their posture was rigid; their movements, formal, deliberate, almost ritualistic. Stiff
gestures would be frozen for agonizing stretches.

A Wilson show was a paradox: an austere spectacle. Stylish and mysterious,
his work was precisely calibrated, yet open-ended in its possible
meanings. You tended not to be able to forget the experience, the look,
the slowness.

He expanded our sense of what could happen on a stage by starkly limiting
the action. In a climactic scene from rCLEinstein on the Beach,rCY his profoundly influential, nearly five-hour collaboration with the composer Philip Glass from 1976, a 30-foot bar of light gradually rotated from horizontal to vertical, then rose into the flies. That was it.

Wilson was born in 1941 into a conservative family in Waco, Texas. He left
in his early 20s for the artistic ferment of New York, but the vast,
luminous expanses he kept creating over the decades echoed the wide-open landscape of his upbringing. rCLI guess Texas is still in my head when I
want more space around everything,rCY he told The New York Times in 1984.

In New York, he studied painting and architecture, and worked on
therapeutic theatrical exercises with children who had disabilities and
brain injuries, which helped point him in the direction his work would
soon go: toward the nonlinear and nontextual, the unconventional and
surreal. The modernist choreography of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine
and Jerome Robbins fascinated Wilson, and he incorporated into his pieces
the rigor of their movement vocabularies and their narrative ambiguity.

By this point there was, of course, a vibrant, scrappy downtown arts
scene. But few were bringing into that milieu the meticulousness of
Cunningham or Balanchine, as Wilson did in the late 1960s and early rCO70s with rCLThe Life and Times of Sigmund Freud,rCY rCLDeafman GlancerCY and rCLThe Life
and Times of Joseph Stalin,rCY all nearly silent.

Their eye-popping durations also set these pieces apart. It was in the
morning after a nearly 12-hour, all-night performance of rCLStalinrCY that Wilson met Glass. They began a series of conversations that resulted in rCLEinstein,rCY an opera that was a culmination of centuries of experiments in the union of image and sound, and a new way to think about plot rCo or the absence of one.

As they discussed potential subjects, Wilson suggested Chaplin and Hitler; Glass brought up Gandhi. They settled on a work that wasnrCOt in any straightforward way about Einstein, though he appears as a violinist and
the whole thing builds to a vision of nuclear apocalypse, the nightmare endpoint of his discoveries.

In lieu of traditional biographical beats, WilsonrCOs cryptic settings included trains, a courtroom trial and a spaceship. He explored these metaphorically loaded places in strange, haunting, sometimes folksy and
funny tableaus over four continuous acts, nine scenes and five rCLknee plays,rCY or short interstitial sections.

rCLEinsteinrCY has no story or characters. What is it about? The extravagant flood of its ideas, energy, ceaseless movement and sudden pools of
reflection, boredom, attention, the passage of time, the distillation of
music and drama rCo operarCOs elemental components rCo into something fresh and
audacious.

Wilson and Glass found each other at just the right moment, bringing out
the best of their aligned gifts for hypnotic repetition and tectonically gradual change. But the tour of rCLEinstein,rCY including its American premiere in a special engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, threw its
creators into debt. Wilson found himself gravitating toward more
financially stable homes in the state-subsidized theaters and festivals of Europe, which also offered generally more adventurous, receptive audiences than in the United States.

He retained his avant-garde eminence at home, though. His productions regularly toured or were revived in the United States, and in 1998, he notoriously staged WagnerrCOs rCLLohengrinrCY at the Met. (He had begun to direct works by others, in addition to his original pieces, in the 1980s.)

The Met was at that point known for ornately naturalistic productions, and WilsonrCOs rCLLohengrinrCY rCo which pared down the opera to some bars of light
and little else rCo was greeted with a storm of boos.

A couple of years ago, when I was working on an oral history of that
staging, I interviewed Wilson at the Watermill Center, the creative
incubator he founded on the east end of Long Island. As he spoke about his vision, he sketched in pencil on a sheet of paper: on the left side of the page, all the scenes and sets in WagnerrCOs libretto, and on the right, his stylized versions. His adaptations were radically abstracted, but faithful
in their essence.

rCLEverything that is called for in rCyLohengrinrCO is there,rCY Joseph Volpe, the
MetrCOs general manager when the production premiered, told me. rCLItrCOs not there in the way most people would expect it. But itrCOs all there.rCY

For some, WilsonrCOs theater was cold and dull. Even for fans, it could sometimes tip into self-parody rCo few directors have had a more immediately identifiable aesthetic rCo or feel merely chic. He eventually became a kind
of luxury brand, churning out trademarked product.

But at their best, his works felt like dreamlike apparitions from another world. They were also, though, deeply human in their childlike wonder,
their endearing hopefulness, their utopian letrCOs-put-on-a-show impulse, those wide-open stages.

Wilson was most comfortable working in visuals, not text; to the extent he used words, they were often collages formed from the voices of others. For
the final moments of rCLEinstein,rCY he asked Samuel M. Johnson, a 77-year-old performer, to write something.

After the ferocious scene of nuclear holocaust, Johnson sat in a bus
onstage and recited a brief, sweet love story. rCLSo profound was their love for each other,rCY he gently intoned, rCLthey needed no words to express it.rCY

rCLEinsteinrCY moves in this last sequence from complete destruction to pure tenderness. This could easily come across as sentimental, but after all
those hours, the poignancy rCo the emergence of innocence from catastrophe,
of simplicity from sophistication rCo just breaks your heart.

Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.

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