Despite some very good advice given to me by NAF1138, I saw The Black Rider. Or, to be more correct, I saw the part of The Black Rider that takes place before intermission.
Oh, my heaven, that was one lousy show, and an hour and a half of my life I will never get back. NAF1138, next time, I’ll give you my tickets.
I assume you saw it at the Ahmanson in LA. As did I.
The problem isn’t Waits… and the problem isn’t even Burroghs “script”… its fucking Robert Wilson and his bullshit theater style.
I actually enjoyed it but I had to struggle with a lot of it. It was just pretentious stereotypical bullshit theater. “Ohhh the table and chairs are larger than the actors!” “Ohhh the charactes over e-nun-ci-ate things” “The characters are dressed in monochromatic themes! Genius!”
I would love to see a production actually use what Waits and Burrogs seem to set up and that’s a dark carnival atmosphere instead of Wilson’s faux folk talk meets Dick Tracy garbage.
Yes, I saw it at the Ahmanson.
While I agree that the staging was terrible (which I began to suspect when it opened on that neon green tie-die-ish curtain and everyone walked out of what looks like a coffin), I also did not appreciate the acting, singing, music, or pretty much anything else. Since I couldn’t understand what pretty much anyone was saying (when they weren’t singing flat, they were singing either gibberish or maybe German – I felt like I caught a word at times), I don’t know the characters’ names, but the goose girl couldn’t sing to save her life.
I cheered when the skinny boy shot the goose, because I thought maybe the goose girl would break up with him and they would all agree to end the play at intermission. Then I realized that the goose girl was sleeping on a dead animal carcass, so she probably wasn’t sensible enough to call it off.
That was about when my friend leaned over to say, “They’ve cancelled intermission because too many people were leaving. I think we’re stuck here.” Since there really wasn’t any applause, there weren’t lulls in which we could have crawled over people to get out (we were in the middle of a row). Fortunately, intermission eventually arrived, and we, along with about half the audience, escaped.
Not to say told ya so or anything…but um…anyway.
No one believes me when I tell them they won’t like it and that they should just give me their tickets. I think it might be the me asking for the tickets part that does it.
Here’s the thing about Wilson’s work,(and don’t for a second think that this isn’t every inch a Robert Wilson show, Waits and Burroghs are just there for flavor, the show doesn’t exist without Wilson) he has gotten REALLY lazy. When he started doing this in the 70’s he was revolutionary. What he did was so different and interesting, and it changed the game in a lot of ways.
No matter what you think of his work now, Wilson is one of the giants of theater and will be remembered as a director who was as influential and revolutionary as Meyerhold, Tzara, and Brooks. (For those of you without degrees in theater this are some of the very heavy hitters of the 20th centry progressive theater movements.)
Unfortunatly, like all revolutionary work, he was so influential that all his great original ideas are now cliches, and all you are left with that isn’t cliche is…not so great. And the problem is, he hasn’t come up with any new ideas. He has sat back and done EXACTLY the same thing as he was doing in the 70’s. So as each generation passes he seems more pretentious and more like a hack, because we can’t recapture that moment in time when what he did really was revolutionary. But that’s theater for you, once the perfromance is over its gone.
Now personally I have only ever seen video of his work, so I really want to see the Black Rider (and am going tonight) but I recognise that I might hate it.
If you want to see one of the best things to come out of Wilson’s influence catch Mathew Borne’s Swan Lake (if you are in LA you missed it, but it is touring) and later this year Mathew Borne’s Edward Scissorhands will be comming to LA, which looks fantastic. What Borne does wouldn’t have been possible without Wilson (and a lot of other people, Martha Gramm etc, but lots of Wilson), but he makes it relevent because he is still working and creating theater that is relevent and fresh, rather than just repeating what he has done in the past.
Campion I am really sorry you hated the show. I think that the only good Wilson does anymore is give young theater directors like me ideas for what we can do with our show’s. But go see Edward Scissorhands when it comes to town. Its gonna rock.
NAF1138, I am also sorry I hated the show. You’re right: it was a parody of avant-garde theater. I didn’t know that Wilson invented the style, and it’s interesting to read your take on it. It does make me wish I appreciated the show more, if for no other reason than its position as history.
I didn’t make it to Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, but I did see *A Play Without Words*, which also befuddled me (but I liked it). Friends who saw Swan Lake raved about it. So, if nothing else, I’ve learned something about theater; thanks for a very interesting post, and I’m intrigued to see your take on The Black Rider after you see it.
Well since you asked, I actually liked it quite a bit. Now doen’t get me wrong, the whole walking in slow motion thing gets tedious after a while, but for the most part I was suprised by how entertaining the spectacle was.
You walked out before my favorite scene in the show too. Near the begginging of the second Act after Wilhelm (the main male character) is addicted to the magic bullets he goes back to Pegleg (the “devil” with the long coat tails) to ask for more. He arrives in the forest where they first met and calls out to Pegleg. Pegleg then lowers in on a chair that looks like it is made out of his coat, holding a box of bullets in his left hand, and with each of the fingers on his right hand on fire. Throughout the scene he keeps casually blowing the fingers out, only to have them relight when he is finished.
T’was super neat-o kean. But I am impressed by feats like that. I am also impressed by the amazing abilities of the actors. To be able to move like that, hold those positions AND sing is astounding. Also the lights were fantastic. The sets didn’t thrill me, but I have never really thought much of Wilson’s art, so that doesn’t surprise me, and I thought that the scene where the house was filled with animal carcases was a little on the nose. In fact that was my biggest problem with the whole show, it kept hitting you over the head with the whole…guns are bad, drugs are bad theme.
At the same time, I felt that the show was uncessesarily obtuse when it came to the plot. I overheard 3 seperate conversations as I left the theater that ran along the lines of :
Person A: “I couldn’t follow the plot of that show at all”
Person B: “Did you read the plot synopsis?”
Person A: “No”
Person B: “Oh, well you should have read that. I read it and didn’t have any trouble”
You shouldn’t have to rely on a person reading the program, in order to get your point across. Your main job as a director is to tell a story, and if you fail to communicate that story clearly, you have failed your primary job.
And yes, Wilson is still doing all the same things he has done for the last 35 years. There isn’t ANYTHING new here. Which is sad. It is especially sad when your main gimick has been done by Kabuki and Noh theater in Japan for the last few hundred years, and has been done better. But Wilson does seem to be continuing in the proud tradition of Brecht and pushing to turn theater from the living room realism of Ibsen and Stanaslovsky, back towards its roots in the spectacular. He just seems to have a huge amount of contempt for his audience, which would seem to defeat the purpose somewhat, and his own ego is so huge that is is now stagnating, but he is at least trying. And that is a good first step.
The thing that I liked most about The Black Rider, is that it was a production that can only work as a theater piece. I can’t be filmed and have the same effect. It just wouldn’t work. My honest belief is that theater is currently struggleing (I will not say that it is dying, like so many others would) because it is stuck being compared to film. I won’t go into my long tretis on how we got to that place, or what I think we need to do to get out, but I think some of what Wilson is doing is a step in the right direction. He is creating a theater that can only exist in the theater, and I have to sort of admire him for that. Now if only he would stop being so lazy and keep pushing his art to new places, things would be better.
So to recap, Wilson is lazy, but ultimatly one of the good guys. He does need to be reminded that you have to give your audience something to work with, because ultimatly they are why you are doing the piece, but the show had some super cool things in it. If I was reviewing this play I would give it a marginal recommedation, but totally understand why others would pan it. My taste leans toward liking giant spectacular theater, and I don’t really need too much plot to keep me happy. But I know not everyone feels that way and I TOTALY understand why you hated the show Campion.
“You shouldn’t have to rely on a person reading the program, in order to get your point across. Your main job as a director is to tell a story, and if you fail to communicate that story clearly, you have failed your primary job.”
…Explain most operas then. 
I stand by what I said. If an opera is well done, you should be able to watch it knowing nothinng about it and still be able to follow along.
Thanks for your explanation, NAF1138. I can look at The Black Rider now and understand (sort of) why the Ahmanson chose to put it on.
Agreed, and the shameful truth is that I skimmed the Discovery Guide the Ahmanson puts on the website, so I had a bit of a handle on the plot. I still had a lot of trouble following what was going on, and frankly found much of it off-putting.
I do understand the notion of theatre as spectacle, and while I agree that theatre ought to be something different from film, it still needs to connect to the audience. This play, probably more than any other one I’ve seen, was utterly selfish. By focusing so much on the “spectacle” they forgot the story. It felt a bit like a grand music video, where nothing makes sense and isn’t meant to.
Unfortunately, theater (unlike film) is immediate and ephemeral. I can’t (won’t) go back and watch this play again. So while I’m intrigued by your exegesis, I won’t have the opportunity to watch the play with that understanding. Which is a bit of a shame. At least with a film, if you missed something, you can go back and look at it again with a critical eye (without paying an arm and a leg, either).
Ach, I too understand why you didn’t like it…bu am still kicking myself for missing it in London about a year or so back.
Wilson’s Hamletmachine was required viewing when I did my BA in theatre. I believe the words my lecturer used for it was “a form of transcendantal boredom”. Apt.