Making a spectacle himself

As a leading figure of the international avant-garde for more than two decades, Robert Wilson is one of the most influential theater artists today. Yet he has enjoyed much greater visibility in Europe than in the U.S. “It’s still difficult to get work here,” says the director-designer, speaking by phone from his loft in New York during the recent Brooklyn Academy of Music run of his staging of Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck.” Created with rock musician Tom Waits and Waits’ longtime collaborator, Kathleen Brennan -- and seen throughout Europe since its 2000 premiere in Copenhagen -- the production comes to UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Tuesday as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival.

Why has there been so little Wilson in the U.S.? “Part of the reason is that we’re very provincial in the U.S.,” says the Texas-born artist. “We don’t really know what’s happening in the rest of the world. We’re such a vast country that we don’t really have an awareness of other cultures.

“In Europe or wherever, a place like Vienna -- which is in some ways very provincial too -- is very near all these different countries, and they’ve all been invaded by one another. They’re much more aware.”

Wilson’s 12-hour international epic, “the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,” was supposed to have been staged in Los Angeles as part of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. But it was canceled when funding fell through at the last minute. The entire work -- which he still considers his “most ambitious” -- was never staged anywhere in its entirety, although parts have been produced in several countries, including the U.S.

Wilson’s last outing in Los Angeles was “Monsters of Grace,” an interdisciplinary work seen in different versions in 1998 and 1999 at UCLA. Created with composer Philip Glass, with a text based on the writings of 13th century poet Jalaluddin Rumi, the piece mixed 3-D computer-generated imagery with music and live performers. Prior to that, L.A.’s last glimpse of Wilson was a 1995 lecture retrospective given by the artist, also at UCLA.

Despite strong attendance at these events, it hasn’t really helped bring more Wilson here. In part that’s because his work’s grand scale makes it costly to produce.

However, that tide is finally about to turn, with several Wilson projects slated for the near future. The director is working with Los Angeles Opera principal conductor Kent Nagano on an independent project called “Manzanar,” about the Japanese American internment camps, slated for an as-yet-undetermined indoor venue here in the early months of 2004. Later that same year, Los Angeles Opera will present his version of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” and UCLA Live will present the landmark 1976 Wilson-Glass opera “Einstein on the Beach.”

A timeless drama retold

Buchner’s “Woyzeck” is about a tortured soldier who murders his girlfriend. The play was left unfinished at his death in 1837, at the age of 23. The intended order of its scenes has never been established, leaving interpreters a comparatively free rein.

The story of “Woyzeck” is actually pretty sketchy. But then, Wilson has never been big on story. His spectacle theater is abstract, with striking visuals and very little interest in conventional psychological realism.

Structurally, Wilson’s original works are often closer to a theme-and-variations model than a linear narrative. When not using assembled or “found” texts, Wilson has radically reinterpreted many classics, or at least challenged conventional notions of how to present them.

Fortunately, the Buchner drama can be approached on many levels. “It’s a simple story and a complicated story,” Wilson says. “It was curious to me, and touching, this complicated issue of this man being used as a medical experiment and this simple, tragic love story.” He also found it surprisingly contemporary. “It’s one of those great works that doesn’t date,” he says. “You would never think of this as something written in the first part of the 19th century.”

The play’s structure, indeterminate though it may be, appealed to Wilson. “The play is written sort of like a film, the way it’s cut and spliced and edited together,” he says. “The way it’s written seemed to fit my style.

“You try to respect the master and you try not to be a slave to him. Hopefully, that’s what Tom and I have done: taken a great author and brought our own personalities to it.”

Wilson and Waits’ desire to work with one another got the project off the ground. “The most important reason to do it is my love and respect of Tom Waits,” says Wilson, who has collaborated with the musician and his wife, Brennan, on two previous occasions: 1991’s “The Black Ryder: The Casting of the Magic Bullets” (also with William S. Burroughs) and 1992’s “Alice,” a fantasy about Lewis Carroll and his “Alice in Wonderland” muse. “I wanted to work with him, and this seemed to be the right piece,” Wilson says. “I could see him as that character and hear his voice in that situation. I thought that he could bring his own ideas to the play and they could sit well.” Waits and Brennan’s music for the production is featured on the 2002 Anti/Epitaph release “Blood Money.” Waits declined to comment.

According to Wilson, “Woyzeck” bears little resemblance to any of the previous ventures, which have little in common. “Their relationship is that they have no relationship, which is a way of relating,” he says. “They reinforce one another by their difference.”

Indeed, exploiting the tension of opposites is a technique that Wilson favors. “Counterpoint is very difficult to do, but often I use it in the theater,” he says. “Some of these songs are quite bloody, and the look is very slick and pretty. That’s confusing to people. Sometimes that pretty face when it has blood all over it is more scary.”

Even though his breakthrough came with the 1970 theater piece “Deafman Glance,” Wilson remains best known for “Einstein on the Beach.” More recently, he has garnered attention for his design and direction of works from the operatic canon, including Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” In addition, Wilson is a visual artist and the founder of Watermill Center, an institute for theater research and development on Long Island, N.Y.

Yet he still senses trepidation about his theater. “I think one of the problems is my work in a formal theater: Ideas are expressed formally; things are more inwardly felt,” says Wilson. “It’s still very strange for an audience in New York to see a play that is performed in a formalistic way.

“We can look at a Rothko, and it doesn’t have to tell me a story. But in theater, opera?”

Although there’s an upward inflection at the end of his words, Wilson leaves his own question unanswered -- a thought finished but not resolved.

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‘Woyzeck’

When: Tuesday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.

Where: Freud Playhouse, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood

Ends: Dec. 15

Price: $70

Contact: (310) 825-2102