They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play

In his online presentation on Zoom in 2021, as part of the Georgia Summit of Theatre Innovators, Robert Wilson took a marker and explained to his viewers that he was once asked to design a city as an assignment for an architecture class taught by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at the Pratt Institute. He drew an apple with a crystal cube inside. He explained: “the crystal cube is the core of a community. It can reflect the universe, the world.” Wilson equates the crystal cube with a space such as a cathedral in the middle of a medieval village, a place for communal and personal reflection. “A cathedral is a place where if you are rich or you are poor you could enter. It was a place where composers showed music, played music. Painters showed paintings. [...] It was the center, the core of the apple.”[i]

As quoted in Cathy Turner’s book Dramaturgy and Architecture, Wilson says “What I learned from her was to apply order and disorder in a way that was meaningful. I think that’s my fascination with architecture. An architect can design a structure, but within that structure, you can let your imagination run free.”[ii] He continues,

During her [Sibyl Moholy-Nagy] lectures she presented us in rapid succession with a car from 1950, a Renaissance painting, a Baroque chandelier, a Byzantine mosaic, a chair by Frank Lloyd Wright, a shoe from the early 19^th Century – so that I could hardly avoid grasping the inherent correlation between architecture and theatre.[iii] 

This correlation between architecture and theatre would speak to Wilson’s process, his vision, for theatrical creation, and by “theatrical creation,” I mean his dance plays and silent operas, as well as his approach to scripted plays and established stories. He creates a visual book (the elements of design and movement) and audio book (spoken text and so on) separately, so that, as he says, “when I put them together, they are running in opposition, but I find moments of shifting so they are in line.”[iv] He furthermore notes, “My work is not arbitrarily placed. At the end, when they come together, it is not a collage. I consciously construct the dualism between what I am hearing and what I see [...] and how they reinforce each other.”[v]

It is with Wilson’s direction of established, Modernist plays that this essay is primarily concerned. I am going to focus on his 1998 production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play which I had the opportunity to see at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in November of 2000. The piece has stayed with me for over twenty-four years. My argument is Wilson, through his process, was able to penetrate an impenetrable play.  I will begin with a brief overview of August Strindberg’s view of A Dream Play (Ett drömspel)—sometimes translated as The Dream Play— and his suggestions for staging what many felt was unstageable at the time. I will then move into an overview of Wilson’s approach to the work, followed by an analysis of Wilson’s production. I will contrast Wilson’s approach with Strindberg’s suggestions, placing focus on a midpoint sequence in the work where I will argue that Wilson—by not having strict fidelity to the text— has found a way to make an impenetrable play easily understood through his use of the postdramatic techniques of playing with time, removing the primacy of the written text, and foregrounding the play as a meditative question rather than a problem that has been solved.[vi] In other words, with A Dream Play, Wilson has offered audiences a privileged seat inside the crystal cube.

August Strindberg

The Swedish playwright, painter, poet, and essayist August Strindberg is often mentioned in the same breath as Norwegian competitor Henrik Ibsen and Russian contemporary Anton Chekhov. Strindberg cemented his status as a great writer of Naturalism with Miss Julie in 1888, but he would move towards abstract, Symbolist works that would anticipate Expressionism.  To sum up his biography, in his life, Strindberg would marry and divorce three times. He was an atheist, a Catholic, a spiritualist, an occultist, a misogynist, a champion of women’s rights, a painter, a photographer, and a deep sufferer from paranoia and a persecution syndrome. Contradictions abound. Put succinctly by Linda Haverty Rugg: “Strindberg was insane,” and the evidence she lists for his insanity range from his “imagining someone is trying to electrocute him through his hotel wall,” to his belief “that he has inadvertently caused his child to fall ill by sending telepathic messages to her via photograph.”[vii] One only needs to read his numerous essays to understand that Strindberg lived in a perpetual state of paranoid agony. His life was that of a tormented seeker, driven by madness, lust, wonder, and despair.

By 1890, Strindberg had moved to Paris and would later move to Germany (though he remained very itinerant, in part due to a somewhat founded belief he would have been institutionalized if he returned to Sweden). During this period, Strindberg became involved with artists and thinkers, such as Edward Munch, who believed truly that there was something beyond the physical, natural world. As Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams notes,

Strindberg had come in contact with ground-breaking works on the subconscious in neurology and psychiatry by such names as Jean-Martin Charcot, Théodule Ribot, and Hippolyte Bernheim. Strindberg referred to his Ockulta Dagboken (Occult Diary), which he started in February of 1896, as “Min journal öfver drömmar” (“My diary over dreams”), perhaps as a reply to Swedenborg’s Dream Diary (“drömdagbok”), which he had become acquainted with in the 1890s.[viii]

Some of the lectures he attended were also attended by Sigmund Freud, who would be inspired to develop his science of dreams.[ix] This is contrary to a popular assumption that Strindberg was reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams while plotting his Inferno plays; on the contrary, both To Damascus I and II were written in 1898, one year prior to Freud’s publication. Rather, Strindberg and Freud both found their inspiration in the lectures they had attended.[x] 

Based on these new discoveries and theories about dreams, Strindberg would reject Naturalism in the theatre and move towards writing plays that would foreground the inner spirituality of the unconscious mind. [xi] The Damascus trilogy imaged, as Rugg states,

an associative logic in a dreaming consciousness, a logic that disregards ordinary constructs of space and time, a logic that disregards distinctions between persons, a logic that argues for a vast unknown territory of mind beneath the light of consciousness[xii]

Strindberg was not only seeking signs that there was something outside of the natural world, but he was also in a way seeking himself through different media of artistic expression. Harry Carson, a Strindberg translator and scholar, argues that through his photographic and painted works Strindberg was attempting to find himself via a process of control and surrender of the vision confronting him.[xiii]  This act of seeking through dreams, through spirituality, via a process of control and surrender speaks to the central character Daughter’s (or Agnes’s) plight in A Dream Play, as she climbs down to understand why humans suffer, what makes them suffer, and perhaps, how by living as a mortal she may ease suffering, hoping to gain not just an understanding of despair but control, ultimately learning the futility of such hopes but gaining compassion.

            When discussing the origins of the A Dream Play, Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams notes that it “was based on two shorter drafts or fragments “Korridordramat” (“The Corridor Drama”) and “Bosättningen” (“Setting up House”).”[xiv] These dramas dealt with the agony of married life and a loss of life’s meaning if the ontological will was surrendered or ignored. As a result, the finished version, A Dream Play, feels fragmented, dreamlike, ponderous, and utterly humorless.

The structure of A Dream Play emulates that of a medieval morality play, in which a central protagonist (in this case Agnes or Daughter, the daughter of the Hindu God Indra) meets allegorical characters who, even if they have given names stated in the dialogue, are known by their work or position: Officer, Poet, Glazier, etc. As she journeys, her father Indra warns of humans in which “Complaint is their mother tongue.”[xv] Agnes befriends a soldier, kept prisoner in a castle built on manure adorned with a chrysanthemum bud, who pines for an actress named Victoria. He will age, age backwards, and wait. Time and space have no meaning in this journey. She marries Lawyer, a pragmatic man who works for the poor and is tormented by the anguishing repetition of life’s tasks—once the handkerchiefs are clean, they need to be cleaned again. A maid takes care of their house, pasting the cracks in the windows and the walls, saying “I paste, I paste.” Towards the close of the play, the various allegorical characters gather outside of the castle near a high, closed-door upstage. There is a fire. Each character casts an object that represents who they are—the fisherman’s net, the glazier’s diamond, the soldier’s roses—into the flames. Behind the large door is the answer to the mystery of life. The learned men debate the theological, scientific, and political ramifications of opening the door which has always remained closed. The door is opened and there is nothing behind it.

Daughter returns to the heavens, recognizing that humans have spiritual hopes, spiritual reflections, awakenings—but lack the potency to affect real change. She declares with compassion,

Oh, now I know all the pain of being, this is what it’s like to be human.... You miss even things you didn’t value, even wrongs you didn’t commit,

You want to go, and you want to stay...and so the heart is divided.[xvi] 

The last image Strindberg leaves us with is the castle burning, the wall behind being made of human faces “questioning, grieving, despairing,” as the chrysanthemum blooms.[xvii] 

Strindberg considered A Dream Play “My most beloved drama, the child of my greatest pain.”[xviii] In dreams, Strindberg writes, “Anything can happen; everything is possible and probable; time and space do not exist . . . imagination spins and waves new patterns made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fantasies, absurdities, and improvisations." The notion that “time and space do not exist” seem to speak to Wilson’s postdramatic sensibility.[xix] Strindberg notes that the people that inhabit the play are “split, doubled, multiplied, evaporated, are condensed, float away, assemble. But one consciousness stands above it all, that of a dreamer: for it is there there are no secrets, no inconsistency, no scruples, no law. He does not judge, does not repudiate, only relates.”[xx] With the play as written, one gets the sense that it is Strindberg himself who is the dreamer. In Wilson’s production, the dreamer is the audience.

Staging A Dream Play as written is a daunting task. As Sue Prideaux writes in her substantial biography of Strindberg, he had initially “wanted to use a magic lantern in order to create a set of dissolving images like a dream in which the action takes place, but the technology could not be mastered so he stipulated the scenery must be stylized, not naturalistic.”[xxi] In the end he suggested abstract drops to be quickly moved to not break the flow of action—another near impossible task. The play was staged for the first time in Stockholm in 1907 by Victor Castegren (starring Strindberg’s then-wife Harriet Bose). It was not a success, in part due to the technological innovations that had not yet been created. (Had Strindberg lived into the 1930s, his desire for multimedia would have been fulfilled.) As Adams notes, Strindberg asks for the following in his stage directions: “The wings, which should remain unchanged throughout the play, are stylized wall paintings, suggesting interiors, exteriors/buildings and landscapes simultaneously;” and in his Preface to the 1907 production, Strindberg writes that the play should move “as a symphony, polyphonic, now and then a fugue with a constantly recurring main theme, which is repeated in all registers and varied by more than thirty voices.”[xxii]

Since its original staging, A Dream Play has enjoyed numerous productions helmed by the likes of Max Reinhardt, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Wilson.  Ingmar Bergman has the distinction of directing the play four times, including once for television in 1963. Prior to mounting it a final time in 1986, he wrote,

I had been dissatisfied with my previous three productions of the seminal play. The Swedish TV version had come to grief over technical disasters (video tapes couldn’t be edited in those days); the performance on the small Stage (Lilla Scenen) turned out poor despite excellent actors; and the German adventure had been ruined by overwhelming sets.[xxiii]

For his fourth production, he had determined to be true to every word of Strindberg’s text, including the passage in Fingal’s Cave: “How to create Fingal’s Cave so that it doesn’t sabotage itself? How shall I maneuver the Writer’s great lament directed at Indra? It consists largely of complaints. How shall I create that storm, the shipwreck and, most difficult of all, Christ walking on water?”[xxiv] His solution was to stage the sequence as a play within a play, in which the Writer assigns roles, adorns a Crown of Thorns, and commences with the lament.[xxv]

Bergman’s approach, to try to capture every moment to the letter, is an approach to dramatic literature that many (what we will call) “literal” or “translator” directors (insofar as directors translate a script to the stage) may take, and it certainly has its rewards. I argue, however, that the most effective way to stay true to the spirit of Strindberg is to ignore his stage directions completely. This is how Robert Wilson was able to solve the riddle of the staging of the work, all the while asking the unanswerable question, “What is it?”

Robert Wilson

            If one is reading this essay, then one is already familiar with Robert Wilson’s work, the effect that the happenings of Cunningham and Cage as well as the choreography of George Balanchine had on his sensibility. In sum, Cunningham and Cage’s happenings were improvisational, with the music and movement not necessarily following each other, but had moments of congruence. Many of Balanchine’s ballets did not necessarily follow a plot and relied on minimal technical values to create abstract lyrical visuals with bodies in space. These are names frequently mentioned by Wilson himself when he discusses his earliest pieces, which have been codified as postdramatic works (though Wilson sees himself as a Classicist).

            The term postdramatic theatre, coined and defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, provides a new way to discuss theatre as a total event that is not intrinsically tied to the study of the playscript-as-theatre. Lehmann writes:

Theatre and drama seem so closely related and quasi identical to many (even to many theatre studies scholars), a tightly embracing couple, so to speak, that despite all radical transformations of theatre, the concept of drama has survived as the latent normative idea of theatre . . .  spectators will say after a theatre visit that they liked the ‘play’ when they possibly mean the performance and, in any event, do not clearly distinguish between the two.[xxvi]  

In other words, audiences, scholars, and critics are so accustomed to considering drama and theatre event as the same object, the term postdramatic theatre is a necessary interruption to this monologic way of thinking.[xxvii]

Lehmann also uses the term postdramatic theatre to demonstrate how directors such as Wilson create forms of theatre rather than performance art with each functioning according to their own different guidelines. This approach, in turn, demonstrates how the “post” in postdramatic reminds us that there is and has been theatre before and after the dramatic text on the page (predramatic may include the earliest works of Greek playwrights, or the chorus that created the dithyramb to Dionysus).

            Prior to his staging of Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1991), Wilson worked primarily outside of scripted plays. As Maria Shevtsova argues, “For Wilson, the autonomy of a production was beyond question: a production was a work in and of itself not merely an animated text.”[xxviii] In other words, the established practice of the director serving as translator of the literary canon was at odds with Wilson’s process. Any utterances in his dance operas (Einstein on the Beach, CIVIL warS, and so forth) were not in the service of a cause-and-effect fabula. However, his interests would develop over the 1980s. When considering a move towards staging established texts, Wilson said:

The creation of new works is what I do best, but I also think it’s important to do other things, and so I want to interpret other people’s works. I’m doing a new opera with Gavin Bryars, an English composer, which is based on Euripides’ Medea. . . . I liked the architecture of the story. . . . I also plan to do Parsifal in 1986 or 87, and then a King Lear, yes, to Shakespeare’s text, and maybe later I’ll do some contemporary works.[xxix]

During his work on Medea (1984), Heiner Müeller (as Maria Shevtsova notes) gave Wilson his play Despoiled Shore Media Landscape with Argonauts to use as a prologue to the opera.[xxx] Müeller would also give Wilson Description of a Picture to be used as a prologue for Alcestis, an opera featuring music by the performance artist Laurie Anderson.

It was through these collaborations with Heiner Müeller that Wilson would become open to staging not only operas but established plays. To quote Shevtsova, Wilson “no longer saw language solely as a sonic effect . . . but as a vehicle for dramatic structure,” even if Wilson “continued to bypass language as a medium for semantic meaning.”[xxxi] Through Müeller and other collaborators, Wilson would soon recognize the power of the spoken word.

In 1991, Wilson directed Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, the first of three Ibsen plays he would stage, the others being The Lady from the Sea (1998) and Peer Gynt (2005). In her considerations of Wilson’s work with Ibsen, Giovanna Zanlonghi’s thoughts tally with those of Shevtsova. Writing about Wilson’s direction of The Lady and the Sea, Zanglonghi states:

It is the opposition of the word against the image, depth against surface, a plunge into darkness against the transparency of light, the density of the human psyche and pulsions against the geometric rendering of gesture and body language. The fact is that Wilson’s visual theatre is based on silence and on evocative sensations, and hardly tolerates the intrusion of the spoken word, which disturbs the contemplation of the eye. . . . And yet the meeting between Bob Wilson and Ibsen’s plays seems to be by now—after three stage renderings—far from improvised or incidental.”[xxxii]

Strindberg is also quite verbose in his plays. When reading the play, one gets the sense there is very little air in any of the conversations. As various productions of Strindberg’s plays sought to find the meaning of the work, few would pare down the language.  Zanlonghi offers that Wilson intentionally focuses on Ibsen’s plays that are not of the “drawing room” variety, “for Wilson has chosen those plays where he could single out his favourite key themes—mystery, silence, the process of interior liberation, a utopian identification between man and nature—and in which he could express his peculiar stage language, at the same time crystal-clear and symbolic.”[xxxiii] A Dream Play also offers mystery, but perhaps not silence, and a less than ideal identification between humanity and its own nature.

As with Ibsen, Strindberg was interested in “plumbing the depths” of humanity’s psyche either through material realities or the fragments of dreams.  For Strindberg, the dream-life became key to recognizing the pain and misery of the human story, something that could not be achieved either through positivist thought or Naturalistic theatre which offered surface representations posturing as depth. Wilson, however, does not seek to understand human behavior in his works, rather he creates aesthetic experience. He is not intending to plumb the depths but rather present the surface. The surface (the total theatre experience) becomes a space, a cube inside of an apple, where the audience, situated as dreamer, can question the aesthetic experience they have just encountered—what is it?—rather than their own humanity. This is not to say there is not an affect. On the contrary, the dance between Strindberg’s words and embodied philosophies, paired with Wilson’s consciously slow yet pregnant direction, becomes a spiritual experience. This is where the metaphor of the crystal cube becomes necessary to an analysis of the production. I will return to this point in the next section.

When Wilson directs modernist stage plays, Shevtsova says, “the point, for Wilson, was not to accommodate his methods to these principles [of drama, spoken and sung], but to shape them to his staging methods.”[xxxiv] Wilson’s methods with his dance plays, operas, and established plays are similar. He is both improvisational and classicist. There needs to be a form. “Formalism,” Wilson has said, “means looking at things from a distance; like a bird who looks into the vastness of the universe from a branch of its tree—in front of it spreads infinity, whose temporal and spatial structure it can nevertheless recognize.”[xxxv] His works, therefore, are more mise-en-scene and less montage. We receive the entirety of the picture rather than short, fragmented scenes (as often is the case with Western drama). There is a clear structure to Wilson’s theatre events, but the structure is visual rather than dramatic. He explains,

I made a twelve-hour [silent] play in seven acts. One and seven are related. Two and six are related. Three and five are related. And it spirals in the middle of the fourth act and it spirals out. This is the same structure as Shakespeare’s King Lear.  This part [early parts] the King is in the Man-Made World. This part [the later parts] he goes into Nature. The center line—“I shall go mad,” says the King – is the turning point.[xxxvi]

This approach to structure—with scenes spiraling towards a center (the turning point) and then spiraling out—is important to note as we discuss his approach to A Dream Play.

Wilson’s A Dream Play

Robert Wilson begins his process by asking his co-directors and dramaturgs to summarize each scene, so he can begin a movement score and create the visual book for the piece. His dramaturgs for A Dream Play were Holm Keller and Monica Ohlsson. His co-directors for the play were Giuseppe Frigeni and Ann-Christin Rommen, the latter of whom (at the time of the production) had worked with Wilson for fifteen years. In her conversation with Maria Shevtsova, Rommen described Wilson’s process thus:

The work usually has three stages. The first stage is called the table workshop, which means sitting with a group of people who are going to work on a piece—the dramaturg, set designer, musician, Bob, and me—all round a table and talking through the piece. This means we tell Bob its content, not by reading it to him, but just telling him. [xxxvii]

As part of this first stage, Wilson would “draw” the set (even in interviews, Wilson is always drawing). From there, his set designer (or in the case of A Dream Play, his scenic assistant, Gordana Svilar) would “look for images and materials.”[xxxviii] The images for Wilson’s visual book for A Dream Play were inspired by photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a turn of the century American photographer. Johnston had received a commission from The Hampton Institute, a vocational school for Inuit and African Americans, to be used to “illustrate contemporary African American life” for the 1900 Paris Word Exhibition.[xxxix] Johnston had taken more than 150 photos which were shown at the Exposition Nègres d'Amerique (American Negro Exhibit) pavilion, which, according to MOMA, “was meant to showcase improving race relations in America.”[xl]

 The opening tableau in Wilson’s production, for example, was an image recreated from Johnston’s photo titled “Stairway of the Treasurer’s Residence at Hampton Institute: Students at Work” (1899-1900).[xli] The photograph shows six student workers building (or possibly fixing) a staircase that moves up from the left to a platform and then continues to the right. The students are dressed in button-down shirts, some in overalls, some in vests, with a couple wearing hats. These students would become the choral bricklayers in Wilson’s production.

            Another photograph by Johnston that inspired Wilson was “A Hampton Graduate’s Home” (1899-1900), in which two girls are standing outside of a white, two-story American farmhouse. The house had three windows upstairs, four on the side (two upstairs, two downstairs), a front porch with a small awning, and a front door to the left (rather than center). A recreation of this farmhouse would be projected during Scene One: The Rising Castle and Scene Thirteen: The Burning Castle (structurally, the first and thirteenth scene are visually connected).

            It seems appropriate that Wilson worked from photographs from the turn of the twentieth century. After all, Strindberg himself was a photographer. He had created a series of self-portraits (which Carlson and Rugg have both suggested was his attempt to find himself), and he also created a process he called “celestography,” or “writing the stars.” As described in The Public Domain Review, Strindberg’s process was to lay out “a series of photographic plates on the ground,” thereby “[r]emoving the ‘middle-man’ of a camera (and even lens), using the light-sensitive plates directly, he was attempting to capture images of the night sky above;” and while he believed himself to be successful, the images he created were in actuality the result of chemical exposure on the plates.[xlii]  Through both naturalistic and experimental photography, Strindberg was attempting to find himself and to unmask secrets from the unseen universe. Whether by coincidence or not, Wilson had tapped into another artform of Strindberg’s when creating his look for A Dream Play, blending the natural images of Johnston’s photographs with the celestial blue lighting evocative of Strindberg’s attempt to photograph the heavens.

For the second phase, Wilson creates a “silent play” with the actors to create the overall movement and physicality for each scene, without consideration of the spoken dialogue. For this production, Wilson worked with the resident company at Stockholms stadsteater (Stockholm’s City Theatre) and the play was performed in Swedish.  Rommen said the company was “very well prepared” for Wilson’s process, having “seen a lot of videos and read books about Bob’s work.”[xliii] The creation of the overall movement of the piece is what Shevtsova calls “the movement score,” which is learned through repetition.[xliv]

When creating the silent play, Rommen says that Wilson,

[L]ooks at his drawing, at the space he has drawn for the scene. Then he directs the actors, puts them in relation to each other, and finds their position and movement. Or else he will step into a character himself. He “feels” a scene for someone and will ask him or her to reproduce his movement, like a dance, a choreography. Many times, a piece of music will help him to find the right “mood” for a scene.[xlv]

This focus on mood and movement is incongruous with Western theatre training, in which actors are asked to find psychological motivations for the characters.  Because his approach is abstract, Rommen acted as an intermediary. In her own words, Rommen says, “In many cases I tried to help them find subtexts for movements so they had a ‘reason’ to do them. Bob never wanted to know what actors were thinking about—‘Don’t tell me’—but they had to tell someone, so that was my part.”[xlvi]

The marriage of movement and the photographs used for the tableaus became Wilson’s visual book for the rest of the production, and the incorporation of the movement and sound becomes the third phase of his process. In the first scene, for example, Agnes walks down a diagonal platform that evokes a seesaw or possibly part of a hobbyhorse or workstation for the five choral builders. The projected image is reminiscent of the large staircase captured by Johnston. The blue lighting gives the world a sleepy, dreamy quality. Jessica Lieberg as Agnes is still, pausing, moving ever so slightly, evoking the notion of Craig’s Übermarionette married with the contemplative nature of Noh theatre. One gets the sense we are watching a photograph slowly come to life. In Strindberg’s script, this is Agnes’s journey from the Heavens to the Earth.

Strindberg’s stage directions are elaborate, in which he asks for backdrops with “clouds that resemble crumbling slate mountains with ruins of castles and fortresses,” noting that “constellations of Leo, Virgo, and Libra can be seen. Between them is the planet Jupiter, shining brightly. Indra’s daughter is standing on the highest cloud.”[xlvii] Liedburg’s Agnes also holds a shoe, which Robert Brustein notes, is “a symbol of the earthly possessions that she, along with the others, will divest herself of in the final scene.”[xlviii] Her movement is controlled; there is a formal stillness; every little motion is noticeable, resembling a Noh-styled dance. In her review for Theatre Journal, Judylee Vivier observed that Liedberg demonstrated “the exquisite physical control of a slow-moving gymnast.”[xlix] Again, Brustein notes: “nowhere has the influence of George Balanchine been more manifest than in the physical twists and turns of this production.”[l] Indeed, Wilson cast this piece (as with his other pieces) not in terms of how performers can speak a text, but rather “by how accurately they can count time.”[li]  This opening moment takes time, allowing the viewer to think about what they are experiencing as it happens. The text metamorphosizes into a part of the movement, the controlled formalized dance of the actor.

The actors, meanwhile, each found a way to make the moment their own; they “filled out” the movements ascribed by Wilson, as if performing stylized choreography. “The movement of actors,” Lehmann states, which is

in slow motion always produces . . . an experience that undermines the idea of action . . . These figures remain solitarily spun into a cosmos, into a web of lines of forces and—quite concretely through the lighting design—"prescribed”paths. The figures (or figurines) inhabit a magical phantasm that imitates the ancient heroes’ enigmatic path of fate drawn by oracles.[lii] 

 With A Dream Play, the movement of the performers, and their sounds, created (along with the lighting, music, and so forth) the rich, mesmerizing dreamlike space over the course of the entire production: the Glazier with his squinted eyes and chuckle, the milking maids who, when each opened their mouth, let out a sound, including glass being broken. Jai-Ung Hong notes that in the production, “the actors did not look anybody in the eye on stage . . . , all actors on stage looked as if they were playing for themselves,” rather than for each other or for the audience.[liii] Soldier sings some of his lines, and when the characters gather by the fire to burn their precious objects in effigy, Wilson, rather than have them stand around a fire, has the characters sit on bleacher-like stairs in front of the farmhouse, holding their objects, including Agnes’s shoe, a rose, a hat, a scarf, a book, and a box. As the characters let go, each object raises up, floating center stage, as if becoming the smoke. This is one of the most striking moments of the production—there is a hushed quiet, as if we in the audience are not just watching but experiencing something sacred.  In short, by blending the visual images from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photos with verbal images from Strindberg’s play and the very controlled movement of the performers, Wilson metamorphosizes Strindberg’s A Dream Play into a dream experienced entirely by the audience.

In terms of his visual dramatic structure, Wilson’s production begins and ends with the tableau of the same staircase. Because we understand the first tableau will tie in with the last, the play will end with Agnes journeying back up the see-saw in the opposite direction, but without the shoe. As Wilson described earlier, each scene in the first half is married to a scene in the latter, with a turning point in between. The scenes are in fact reflections, with every moment in the first half spiraling towards a center and each moment spiraling outward after.

The seventh scene of the play as written is the turning point. In this scene, the Lawyer laments to Agnes (Daughter) that he has been refused doctoral wreaths at a ceremony in town. The setting is described as a church chancel. Agnes, speaking with Lawyer, says she will plead his case to the heavens to ease his misery. In their fragmented conversation, she says when she looks into a mirror, she sees as the world as it really is. Lawyer suggests that life is the false copy, the reflection the real. This is important for how Wilson will stage the scene. Church bells are heard, and Daughter entices Lawyer to marry her. As she does so, Strindberg tells us the background will transform into Fingal’s grotto, with water crashing behind them, “producing a sound ensemble between winter and waves.” Lawyer laments

“But I’m poor.”

Daughter: What does that matter as long as we love each other? A little beauty costs nothing.

Lawyer: Maybe the things I like you’ll dislike

Daughter: Then we’ll compromise

Lawyer: And if we tire of each other?

Daughter: Then a child will come and bring us delights that are always new!

Lawyer: And you’ll have me, an outcast: poor, ugly, and despised?

Daughter: Yes, let us join our destinies.

Lawyer: So be it then.[liv]

In Wilson’s presentation, we have an arch created by bricks upstage, with a shorter wall of bricks downstage. The bricklayers/chorus members are working, while the music swells beneath them. The entire scene is played twice: the first time, if memory serves, the lighting in the backdrop was red, with the bricklayers’ work being more gestural, each holding onto a brick of their own, placing it, and bringing it back up, representing the building of a wall. The second time, the background was blue, with the bricklayers all sitting and singing under the spoken text (longtime collaborator Michael Galasso created the beautiful music for this play). We are watching both the original and the mirror, the first and the copy. The second time, the lights in the audience pulsed  as we in the theatre became both the copy and the original, entwined with what we were experiencing onstage. We were inside the cube inside the apple. The space for reflection. This moment also encapsulates Wilson’s own thoughts on the entirety of the play itself. In his words,

What he called A Dream Play—in a sense, it’s very concrete. . . . You just blinked your eyes. What did you see. You don’t know, but it’s a part of seeing. It’s a negative image. Maybe for a fraction of a second you were dreaming? I don’t know—but this interior image was there. We see both interior and exterior things all the time.[lv] 

Metaphorically speaking, inside the crystal cube we are both the original and the reflection. We are fragmented, and we are whole. Wilson offers Strindberg’s contradictions in a way that is remarkably concrete while retaining the quest of the spiritual aspirant. As Joseph Melillo, the former Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, states: “I think it’s magical how a playwright and Wilson coming together reveals itself in unique, distinct ways. When Wilson put on Strindberg’s Dream Play . . . , the surprise was that you found yourself saying ‘oh, yeah! He made sense out of this obtuse play.’”[lvi] Or, to borrow from The Guardian critic Michael Billington who was moved by Wilson’s production, “If life, as Strindberg suggests, is a meaningless dream, it is one to be suffered with maximum grace.”[lvii] Critic Robert Brustein also lauded the production. He writes,

Wilson solves the insoluble problems of the play largely by ignoring them completely. There are, in this production, no Faustian prologues in heaven between Indra and his daughter, no contrasting views of Fairhaven and Foulstrand, no quarantine stations, no flaming castles flowering into chrysanthemums. . . . Wilson, in short, is not uniting with the play as much as running along side it. It is as if he were dreaming A Dream Play, adapting its subterranean melodies to his own unheard music.[lviii] 

Brustein also notes that Wilson’s production has a sense of play, a humor that allows the audience entrance into the work, rather than the tortured visions of an author begging for redemption. As an audience member, this was also my experience with the production: there was a humor, a joy, an understanding that life is suffering, but there is still music, still the hope for love, still a question behind the door (rather than an answer) that not even the learned could begin to appreciate, to behold. Time and space did not exist; I was aware of my own contemplation, my own feeling of harmony. I surrendered any sense of control over to the production.

 Wilson’s process was ideal for this play, as Wilson and Strindberg together created the most wonderful and haunting dream. Echoing Strindberg’s introduction again when he writes: “[O]ne consciousness is superior to them all: that of the dreamer.”[lix] And while the dreamer for Strindberg is Daughter, for Wilson’s production, we in the audience are the dreamer, which is what makes Wilson’s postdramatic production sublime. Giovanna Zanlongnhi notes that a crystal is “something that both encloses and reveals.”[lx] Robert Wilson offers audiences the crystal cube through his production, seating us within his own reflective theatron, and through his process Wilson finds the play, creating Strindberg’s desired space for personal reflection and compassion.