Wilson, Robert

▪ 1997

      In one sense the opening in June 1996 of Robert Wilson's Time Rocker in the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, Ger., marked the culmination of the controversial theatre director's enormously successful career in Europe. In another sense, however, it marked his growing acclaim in his homeland. For more than two decades, Wilson had been one of the most original and sought-after artists in Europe, but he was little known in his native United States.

      The 1995 premiere of his Hamlet: A Monologue at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, was a major homecoming event for Wilson. Working as writer, director, designer, and solo performer, he presented Hamlet at the moment of his death flashing backward through 15 of the original's scenes. He danced awkwardly, threw childish tantrums, growled, and was haunted by props that eerily evoked absent characters. Wilson followed the success of Hamlet with a production of Snow on the Mesa, a dance work that paid tribute to Martha Graham at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and a staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts for the Houston Grand Opera.

      Back in Europe Time Rocker was the final production in a trio of works for the Thalia company that began with The Black Rider (1990) and continued with Alice (1992), a retelling of the Lewis Carroll books, both with music by Tom Waits. Like most of his recent works, Time Rocker had much to do with Wilson's minimalist decor and lighting and less to do with music (by Lou Reed) or dialogue (by Darryl Pinckney). The Hamburg trilogy, dubbed "art musicals," offered an alternative experience to the typical Broadway production, which Wilson believed was becoming more and more like television, with a programmed audience reaction every few seconds.

      Wilson was born Oct. 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas. He studied business administration at the University of Texas at Austin, but he dropped out in 1962 to move to New York City to pursue his interest in the arts. After earning a degree in interior design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1966, he started his own experimental theatre group, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, which operated out of his loft in the SoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan. Wilson quickly gained recognition among New York's art elites. His productions were praised for their innovative use of lighting, space, and sound and their provocative contradictions of time and place. By the early 1970s he was staging works throughout Europe.

      Wilson's range was vast; he produced Japanese No plays, standard operas such as The Magic Flute and Salome, and 12-hour-long theatre pieces. Among his best-known works were The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1974), Einstein on the Beach (1976), on which he collaborated with composer Philip Glass, Death, Destruction, and Detroit (1979), and The Civil Wars (1983). Wilson also received critical attention as an installation artist and as a furniture designer. (JAMES HENNELLY)

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