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by Philip Glass, directed by Robert Wilson

Luminato, Sony Centre, Toronto

June 8-10, 2012

“Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon”, Bus Driver in Knee Play 5

Anyone who loves theatre should give thanks that Luminato has brought Einstein on the Beach to Toronto.  The 1976 “opera” is a seminal work of 20th-century theatre that has had untold influence the creation of multimedia performance pieces ever since.  Yet, it is a work more talked about than seen.  Luckily, Pomegranate Arts along with seven arts groups has revived the work with the participation of its original creators – composer Philip Glass, director and designer Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs.  It is surely the mark of a classic that Einstein on the Beach that seemed so experimental in 1976 still seems avant-garde 36 years later.

Part of the reason for this is that the co-creators are so united in their goals for the work.  They wanted to create a plotless multimedia work about a great man whose ideas changed the world.  Instead, of a narrative to motivate the action, the action arises as the development of an interrelated group of visual, musical and dance motifs, all related in some way to aspects of the life and work of Albert Einstein.  The four acts are “Train”, Trial 1” and “Trial 2” and “Spaceship” with five “knee plays” to begin and end the opera and connect the acts.  Images from one act reappear and recombine with images in succeeding acts, until all appear in Act 4.  A train appears because Einstein used to play with toy trains as a child and because he used trains to illustrate his theory of relativity.  The two trials are not trials of Einstein but are there to suggest the unintended consequences of his discoveries, like the atomic bomb.  The spaceship references Einstein’s special theory of relativity that states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  Because Einstein was a violinist, he is represented as a violinist (Jennifer Koh) on a raised platform in the orchestra pit. 

The work is completely unlike a conventional opera since the only people who sing do so as part of a chorus or as members of the orchestra.  Even then the words they sing consist only of numbers or solfeggio syllables.  The numbers constantly remind us of the medium Einstein worked in while the syllables, singing a note by the name for the note, reflect Einstein’s overall project of getting to the very essence of things.    

All other words are spoken by various generalized characters on stage.  For some the most infuriating aspect of the opera is that the spoken texts by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs have nothing directly to do with the action presented.  Rather, the spoken texts are subject to repetition and gradual alteration just as the music and dance are.  Various key phrases embedded in near-non-sense monologues – like “I feel the earth move”, “I have been avoiding the beach” or “This could be about the things on the table This about the gun” – casually occur, evoking associations with Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach about a nuclear holocaust that gives the work the second half of its title.  Performers Helga Davis and Kate Moran are amazing in being able to make each of the myriad repetitions of their texts sound as if they were speaking it for the first time.  On rare occasions some performers, like Charles Williams, are given a text spoken only once.  Williams, whose words as a Bus Driver end the opera, speaks his words with such warmth about two young lovers attempting to express the infinity of their emotions that you feel as if the entire opera had been leading up to this simple expression of love.

I had listened to the CDs of the opera for two decades without even having seen it on stage.  In viewing it at last, what surprised me was how austerely beautiful the work is.  This is because Glass, Wilson and Childs all share the same aesthetic of breaking each art form into small components and then building it up again through a gradual additive process.  Glass’s music is so repetitive because it moves forward in musicals cells that combine to form cycles that gradually change over time by the addition or subtraction of musical components.  Childs’s dance is a perfect embodiment of this.  The first of her two stunningly beautiful dance sequences consists almost entirely of dancers making 180º turns across the floor, circling each other in groups of two or four, back to back, and then spinning off again.  From these minimal components she builds up exquisite patterns of motion, attraction and repulsion that, with reference to Einstein, evokes the movement of subatomic particles.  In her second dance she retains the basis of 180º turns but adds piqué and reverse turns and fouettés en tournant, along with simply standing still, to create even more complex patterns.  It is the reduction to essentials that evokes a feeling classical pureness.                              

          

Robert Wilson’s direction follows the same principles.  Unlike modernism which tries to find mythological universals in the everyday (think of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses), Wilson presents the everyday as archetypal.  Common movements are stylized both to create theatrical symbolism and for humour.  Reading is represented by holding up a book and the reader shaking his head back and forth.  Calculation is shown by the worker imitating the use of an old-fashioned adding machine with pull crank.  During the first Trial scene, everyone arrives with identical brown bag lunches, which, we discover, contain identical lunches that they eat in an identical way.  Costume designer Carlos Soro reinforces this notion by dressing virtually the entire cast, regardless of gender, in collared off-white shirts, grey trousers with suspenders and high-top black Keds.  The cast thus appears as components that compose a greater unity.  Yet, in the generally black, white and grey colour scheme of the production, one man stands out – a man in a red jacket excitedly scribbling equations on an invisible chalkboard.          

Wilson also directs in an incremental style.  In the first Train scene he presents parade of characters, each with stylized gestures, that culminates in the appearance of a cardboard-cut-out style steam engine.  The first time we see only the cowcatcher and the front of the engine.  The sequence is repeated several times, each time allowing us a greater view, until we see the whole engine and coal car.  During the first dance sequence a small spaceship glides overhead.  During the second there is a larger one, until the actual Spaceship act where we are simultaneous inside and outside a stage-filling spaceship where the stage action summarizes all that has gone before.  

What is so overwhelming about the entire production – music, dance and director – is the incredible precision with which it is performed.  If you think a chorus singing “one two three” might be boring, just listen to the stunningly virtuosic a cappella section and delicious close harmony that makes up Knee Play 3.  If you think that Glass’s constant use of arpeggiation is mechanical, just listen to the passion Koh puts into her violin solos.  Wilson’s use of stylized gestures – even choreographing an actor’s movements down to specifically repeated facial expressions – may sound off-putting, but the performers carry it off with such effortlessness that you are struck more by the playfulness of this tactic than by its undeniable rigour.  The playing of the six-member Philip Glass Ensemble under Michael Riesman, who has conducted every performance of the piece since the beginning, is immaculate. 

In a work of built up of such small components in such a regimented fashion, it comes as a surprise that in Act 4 it incorporates a scene called “Building” that defies everything that has gone before.  A drop shows a cartoon of a tall building with a cut-out window behind which a woman is sitting and making adding machine gestures.  One by one the chorus comes out and stops in place, each in a different pose – the first time in the opera the entire group has been depicted as individuals.  The accompanying music features a background of familiar Glassian arpeggios but saxophonist Andrew Sterman plays an extended series of jazz improvisations on the underlying motifs.  The creators seem to be saying that their work not only can encompass freedom and individuation but needs to do so both in order to be complete and to illustrate the idea of relativity.

Einstein on the Beach is performance art on a massive scale.  It is not meant to explain a genius’s life and ideas but to organize reflections on their resonance.  With a running time of four-and-a-half hours without intermission, the public is given the freedom to come and go at any time, I fully expected to leave my seat at least once.  Instead, I was riveted to my seat for the entire time.  Once you accustom yourself to the cyclical nature of all elements of the production and its portrayal of gradual but unceasing change, the end when it comes, though the creators let you down gently, still comes as a surprise.  It’s very difficult then to make the transition from the tightly organized world in which you have been immersed into the disorder of the world outside.  Nevertheless, you do have the comfort, as the work suggests, that beneath all the superficial chaos there is an underlying order that one human mind at least was able to perceive.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Act 4, Scene 3, Spaceship. ©2012 Lucie Jansch.

For tickets, visit www.luminato.com.