Genius on the stage

Mysterious and beautiful, an amalgam of avant-garde theater, opera and dance, Einstein on the Beach rattled the art world with its 1976 debut. Stage director and designer Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass, visionaries both, took cutting-edge ideas nurtured in the intimacy of New York's downtown loft scene and staged a four-hours-plus spectacle uptown at the hallowed Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. What's more, they brought the downtown audience uptown for two sold-out Sundays. 

As Philip Glass once recounted: "I remember standing backstage during the second Sunday's performance, watching the audience with one of the higher-up administrators of the Metropolitan Opera. He asked me, 'Who are these people? I've never seen them here before.' I remember replying very candidly, 'Well, you better find out who they are, because if this place expects to be running in 25 years, that's your audience out there.'"

Thirty-six years later, an audience is still ready to sit through this mesmerizing landmark of 20th century culture. Einstein has been much written about, thrice recorded and is the subject of a documentary, but it's rarely been performed since its debut. The three sold-out (sorry) performances this weekend at the Power Center in Ann Arbor mark only the second time that this modern masterpiece has been staged in North America outside of New York City. 

Einstein on the Beach: An Opera in Four Acts presents a narrative-free, abstract, dreamlike, prismatic impression of the iconic scientist over something close to five hours with no intermission. Rather than tell a story, Einstein slowly reveals a system of repeating motifs, both visual and musical.

This past Sunday, at the Penny Stamps Lecture in Ann Arbor, Wilson and Glass talked about Einstein and the difficulty that so many people have with this kind of abstraction. "Abstraction is really not a part of our vocabulary, for most people," Wilson lamented. A particular gesture, he said, "has no meaning for me. It's something pure on its own, it's something abstract. And it doesn't have to relate to the music, it doesn't have to relate to the text. It can be something pure on its own, as a movement."

One inspiration here is from Merce Cunningham in the world of avant-garde dance, where movement is independent of sound or visual cues. Another source, Wilson explained, is the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson from the early 1930s: "Four Saints in Three Acts, was a great inspiration to me, because it was not a narrative. It was theme and variation. I directed the play, about 10 or 12 years ago, and it was so curious. The New York Times review was shocking. They were trying to make a story when there is no story. There was nothing really radically new about it. Once you call it 'opera,' it's very difficult to make you think abstractly. We can experience it just for time-space construction. It doesn't have to tell you a narrative." 

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