The second part of the performance, set in a breathtaking chandelier-and-cypress space, ends with an old Lithuanian "Tale of the Cat," narrated by two Spirits (Agnieszka Ravdo and Martyna Gedvilaitė). Let us look at it closely, because it provides an ideal point of departure for understanding the production as a whole.

One day, while a cat was hunting mice in a cabbage field, a large leaf suddenly fell onto his tail. Terrified, he concluded that the sky was falling and bolted. Along the way he met a hare, who believed him without question and ran beside him. Soon a fox and a wolf joined them, each accepting the alarming news without a moment's hesitation. Only a bear decided to investigate the source of the rumor. Questioning the animals one by one, he eventually reached the cat and discovered that the cause of all the commotion was nothing more than an ordinary cabbage leaf. Realizing their mistake, the animals quietly returned home.

In the tale, everything begins with a misreading of reality. The cat feels the leaf strike him and immediately mistakes it for the end of the world. He does not verify what has happened. He acts out of fear. That fear spreads from one animal to the next until a collective panic, built entirely on illusion, takes hold. Only the bear interrupts the mechanism and restores reality: the sky has not fallen—it was only a cabbage leaf.

Look closely at the production's central character, the Poet, and his path toward self-knowledge follows precisely the same trajectory.

It begins, theatrically, in complete darkness, from which only the Poet's head (Dainius Svobonas) emerges. It is difficult to resist the feeling that we meet him at the moment described by Dante in the opening of The Divine Comedy: "Midway upon the journey of our life," when the pilgrim, "having lost the path that does not stray," finds himself in a dark forest.

The association matters because it establishes the temporal frame of the entire production—the stretch between maturity and death. Everything begins with an act of painful self-recognition. The hero becomes aware of where he stands, who he has become, and what balance his life has achieved. This realization propels him toward what follows: a peculiar journey.

It is peculiar because it unfolds simultaneously in waking life and in dreams, within the realm of art that is the Poet's natural home and beyond it, in reality itself. The embodiment of this magical duality is the guide fate assigns him: Don Juan (Gytis Laskovas). Don Juan, however, is himself divided—between the legendary seducer created by cultural history and the historical Miguel Mañara, the man of flesh and blood. The allusion is deliberate. Don Juan was one of the central figures in the imagination of Oskar Milosz, whose alter ego the Poet appears to be.

The Poet therefore receives, perhaps only half-consciously, the task that matters most: to examine his own life in what amounts to a double mirror, seeking its structure and its meaning, trying to understand where it is all leading. Narratively, he embarks on a journey through memory, imagination, and experience. Encountering Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle (Kęstutis Jakštas), women, shadows of the dead, and fragments of his own past, he confronts loneliness, unfulfillment, love, death, and the collapse of illusion.

Following a suicide attempt and the experience of profound grief, he undergoes a spiritual transformation. He comes to understand—and we understand with him—that none of the traumatic experiences of human life is truly the end of the world. Each is only a cabbage leaf falling naturally onto a cat's tail.

This gradual reconciliation with the order and mechanism of existence possesses another formal elegance. The production moves steadily from darkness into light, until, bathed in illumination at the finale, the Poet experiences an inner enlightenment.

Wilson and Chemin's way of presenting the Poet's life simultaneously "five feet above the ground" and firmly on it causes his dilemmas to appear, almost of their own accord, gently exaggerated—and gently mocked.

They achieve this through a series of carefully chosen interruptions that puncture the solemn, romantic, occasionally self-important discourse of the suffering artist. Among them are the actresses' running commentary throughout what often resembles an operetta (and, indeed, this production occasionally carries the scent of operetta); Kęstutis Jakštas's wonderfully physical slapstick performance as Sganarelle; and the unexpected radio dialogue that abruptly interrupts the Poet's earnest attempt to transform his own life into theatre while he remains absorbed in his spiritual introspection.

Each interruption belongs to a different theatrical convention.

These are among the production's finest moments. They create breathing room within the dense poetic language of Oskar Milosz, allowing the audience to meet the Poet's thoughts and Wilson's extraordinary stage images without suffocation. They suspend dramatic time and open a space for contemplation.

Returning to the tale of the cat, the quarrel between the two actresses over how the story should be performed immediately introduces the theme of theatre within the theatre. In doing so, it connects the story of an artist "midway through life's journey" with the fate of the production's creator, Robert Wilson, who died during its creation.

Even without these self-reflexive passages, it would be almost impossible not to see the Poet as Wilson's alter ego. His journey becomes, inevitably, a parable of Wilson's own life—a destiny that, whether comic or terrifying, could only ultimately be fulfilled in solitude.

Seen from this perspective, the title 7 Solitudes needs no explanation. As many people, as many solitudes. There are seven actors; there are seven forms of loneliness.

The production itself is magnificent, as are the performances.

Every member of the ensemble deserves recognition: Martyna Gedvilaitė, Kęstutis Jakštas, Gytis Laskovas, Miglė Navasaitytė, Agnieszka Ravdo, Dainius Svobonas, and Vladimiras Šerstabojevas.

The creative team is equally outstanding: Hans-Jörn Brandenburg (music), Stephanie Engeln (set design), Marcello Lumaca (lighting), Flavia Ruggeri (costumes), Manu Halligan (make-up and hair), and Tomasz Jeziorski (video).

The production was conceived and designed by Robert Wilson and Charles Chemin but realized without the watchful eye of the American master. Even so, it remains unmistakably a Robert Wilson production—his theatrical language is present in every image.

What is perhaps most moving is that Wilson, much like the Poet he helped create, seems to continue spinning the thread of his narrative from beyond the grave, with complete serenity, because for him death is nothing more than the fall of a cabbage leaf.

Meanwhile, Charles Chemin's Sganarelle quietly points toward this truth with the subtlest of gestures, reminding us that 7 Solitudes is also, unmistakably, a performance about Robert Wilson himself.

Once that realization arrives, emotion catches in the throat almost instantly.