I've had to wait 20 years to see this landmark work a second time and still don't feel quite ready to talk about it. Can I see it again? Preferably not in 20 years time, but sooner?
Einstein On The Beach is a signal artistic achievement and happily remains as thrilling and rich an experience today as it was when I saw it in 1992. (The piece debuted in 1976 and was also revived in 1984.) Audiences certainly seem to have finally caught up with it. At that 1992 revival at BAM, I was astonished when a small but notable chunk of the crowd left early. Surely by then they knew what to expect from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson ? And yet, it was still shocking and frustrating to those unable to adjust. Today, the piece is just as challenging. But the vocabulary it employs has become so widespread that theater-goers are ready for it. This new production makes clearer than ever why Einstein On The Beach reinvigorated opera; popularized the avant-garde downtown scene; and made the careers of composer/lyricist Philip Glass, director Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs .
This is not a wholly reimagined production of Einstein. In essence, it is the show that debuted in 1976, with technological changes and trims where appropriate. So I wasn't quite expecting how new and vibrant it would feel, how I would keep battling in my brain to compare the 2012 edition with the 1992 edition I thought was emblazoned on my imagination forever. However, that liar we call memory fooled me again and again; in particular, one action, one tableau I remember vividly from 1992 and which has been the source of an anecdote I've repeated over and over for the past 20 years actually never happened. (Instead of a moon passing across the sky from one side of the stage to the other, it remains in place and slowly goes in and out of eclipse.)
Other images and scenes struck me as radically different despite minimal changes. This shouldn't be a surprise. Since Wilson pares back moments to their essentials, even the tiniest change in color or scenery is sure to have a dramatic impact. Diving into articles about the show after I saw it, I discovered that new lighting equipment meant the colors were slightly different; new tools meant sometimes the instruments that had been played 20 years ago were now sampled; new speeds at which scenes could be changed meant transitions could be smoother. This is absolutely the Einstein I remember, but it is also fresh and new and thrillingly different.
But what exactly happens for those five hours? The piece begins with a knee play, Wilson's word for the brief front of stage actions that take place while scenery is being switched. It has its roots in vaudeville, where a comic or duo would step to the front of the stage and do a bit while a new act set up or a new scene was put in place. Half an hour before the official curtain time, two performers are front stage left, one of them uttering random numbers and the other repeating a text over and over again. Slowly more performers fill up the pit alongside the musicians. The performers on stage also make a strange, odd sort of motion with their hands. In 1992, it was merely strange and random; today, in a nice bit of synchronicity, it looks for all the world like they are manipulating a computer's mouse. Who knows what it will look like in another 20 years?
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What follows are seven scenes or tableaux, two dance pieces and four more knee plays. A train pulls into a station. A trial begins. A train pulls out of a station. A trial continues and prison follows. A person in a building. A person on a bed. A spaceship lights out for the territories. A bus comes into view. The scenes are simple, iconic, even totemic. The text is seemingly random, sometimes poetic, often amusing, always engaging. The dancing is thrilling and wildly challenging for the performers. The music surges and flows and envelops it all. The result is inexplicably thrilling. I've seen plenty of avant-garde pieces where artists struggled to combine apparently random actions and events and scenes into a coherent whole. Rarely does it work. (There's a reason why characters and plot dominate the theater.) Sometimes, somehow it does cohere. If I knew why Einstein On The Beach doesn't merely cohere but is intellectually and emotionally powerful, I suppose I'd be making art rather than watching it. Let me see it four or five or ten more times (the way I have seen and re-seen Shakespeare's plays and my favorite movies and books and albums) and I might begin to figure it out.
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