Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective

When Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel returned to Europe from their Californian exile in 1947, their son Stefan stayed in the United States.[1] After getting a PhD in philosophy from Harvard (for a dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), teaching philosophy at the University of Miami, and pursuing postdoctoral studies on Hegel and Karl Marx in Paris, Stefan settled in New York City in the mid-1960s, where he got involved in the experimental theatre scene. Apart from writing poetry (and publishing it in German and English),[2] his most ambitious project was to document The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies in a series of monographs. Out of ten books of a planned series, he only completed three: The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, which was first produced by the West German publisher of his father’s works, Suhrkamp, in 1978;[3] Queer Theatre, with chapters about Jack Smith, The Theatre of the Ridiculous, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and others, also first published by Suhrkamp in 1978;[4] and two volumes on Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, first published in 1988 by Methuen and Routledge, who also published translations of his father’s works.[5] Volumes on Richard Foreman’s diary theatre, on the collective improvisation of Mabou Mines, on theatre as psychotherapy, on Black Theatre, and on Dance were announced but never published. (New York University’s Fales Library now holds the Stefan Brecht Papers.)

In the late 1980s, during a one-year stay in the PhD Program of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York—then housed in the Grace Building and the adjacent building on 42nd Street—I bought a copy of Stefan’s book The Theatre of Visions at a small bookstore in the Broadway district. At the time, I found the book rather impenetrable—with its unwieldy combination of barely edited interview transcriptions, journal-style rehearsal notes, multi-page footnotes, moment-by-moment descriptions of productions, detailed formal analyses of these productions, and aesthetic, phenomenological, and psychological reflections on Wilson’s work. It is probably because this English-language book was first produced by a German publisher that little attention was paid to the overall structure and composition of the manuscript as well as its copyediting. There are many aspects of the book that would be considered problematic these days (for example, inappropriate references to lesbian performers and performers with disabilities). However, while re-reading The Theatre of Visions recently, I was surprised by the analytical depth and quality of reflection on Wilson’s early work that the monograph provides.

Stefan performed in several of Wilson’s productions, for example, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, Overture in 1972, and A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1974. In The Theatre of Visions, he covers Wilson’s work from the late 1960s to 1977, and he distinguishes two periods in Wilson’s work: the early non-verbal, image-driven projects—including The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Deafman Glance, Overture, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin—and the later ones, in which Wilson started to experiment with texts, including A Letter for Queen Victoria, The $-Value of Man, Spaceman, Einstein on the Beach, and I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. Stefan considers the first period—in his view: the theatre of visions proper—a successful attempt to create a theatre dominated by the right brain’s visual, spatial, and synthesizing powers,[6] whereas the use of language in Wilson’s later productions failed to play to the “right brain’s peculiar prowess for verbal communication” in terms of contextual considerations, “semantic liberality,” and “phonetic sensitivity.”[7] Because they did not “incorporate speech independently of its syntactic and semantic essence,” “freed of the habitual conscious left brain domination,” Stefan argues, the productions of this period destroyed Wilson’s theatre of visions.[8] 

The focus in the following will be on Stefan’s description and analysis of the key aesthetic characteristics and underlying assumptions of the first period, and especially on the production of Deafman Glance, to which he devotes almost ninety pages.[9] Subdivided into three sections (i.e., a detailed description of the performance and two sections on its meaning and form), each consisting of a numbered sequence of paragraphs, these pages almost read like a “Short Organum[CS1] ” of Wilson’s early work. As a performer in and spectator of Wilson’s early pieces, Stefan was in a privileged position to write about Wilson’s work. Since Wilson himself, differing from some of his peers in the New York theatre scene like Richard Foreman and Richard Schechner, did not articulate his own vision and approach in writing, The Theatre of Visions filled a gap, even though it represented Stefan’s point of view, not Wilson’s. Although Stefan makes few direct references to his father and his father’s theatrical concepts, many of his reflections and observations resonate with Bertolt’s theories, despite the fact that Wilson did not work with dramatic texts at this stage, was less overtly interested in politics than many of his contemporaries in experimental theatre, and supposedly played towards the strength of the other side of the brain usually identified with Bertolt’s work. It is also useful to draw out the resonances between Bertolt’s theories and Stefan’s text because other scholars and critics—partly due to Heiner Müller’s mediation and his assertion that “Bob [Wilson] achieved what [Bertolt] Brecht only dreamed of doing: the parting of the elements”[10]—later identified and discussed features of Bertolt’s aesthetics in Wilson’s work,[11] and Wilson himself later directed Bertolt’s The Ocean Flight and The Threepenny Opera at the Berliner Ensemble.

The following exploration compares and contrasts Bertolt’s aesthetics and Wilson’s early work (as theorized by Stefan) to identify resonances as well as differences between their respective formal, thematic, and conceptual frameworks.

Stefan makes it clear that one of his father’s key notions, Fabel, is absent from Wilson’s work. Fabel presupposes a dramatic text and is this text’s “dialectically interpreted plot . . . made ‘playable’ for a modern audience”[12] by the dramaturg, director, designers, etc. If a Fabel is still present in Wilson’s work, then only in a modified shape no longer recognizable as a verbally distillable narrative that informs the entire production’s structure. Stefan writes about Deafman Glance that there “is no forward pointing line, fable or plot.”[13] However, the show still plays with the audience’s expectation of a Fabel and makes the search for it an active part of their viewing experience: “Indications are given, commitments withheld, traces obscured.”[14]

Different from his assessment of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in his later publication,[15] Stefan emphasizes in The Theatre of Visions that Wilson’s theatre does not engage with “practical and social concerns” and “has no propagandistic, moral, emotional, educational intentions or effects.”[16] He even goes so far to insinuate that his father’s theatre resembles Wilson’s in this regard and therefore falls short of Bertolt’s own stated goals: “the spectator of a Wilsonian spectacle like the spectator of most other kinds of spectacle (even a B. Brechtian one) is apt to have abandoned for the time of the spectacle, his/her practical extra-theatrical interests and concerns.”[17] It is therefore interesting that Stefan himself provides a Marxist analysis of one aspect of Deafman Glance: the construction of three, horizontally lined-up wooden bins by several performers on stage, which goes on for a long time. Once these bins have been completed, they just stand there empty before they are finally filled in. Stefan argues that the ordinariness of the “staged image” of constructing the bins juxtaposed with other images on stage invites the spectator to identify it “with the chief horror of industrial capitalism in his own life: the alienation of labor.”[18] 

Stefan’s discussion of Wilson’s later $-Value of Man, however, which had both “an explicit and pervasive theme, money” and “a message: one shouldn’t have to pay for things,” is more critical.[19] This show included an ironic recitation of a New York Times article about a classroom experiment by a Long Island University professor that was supposed to demonstrate “to his students their hypocrisy in denying putting a monetary value on the life of human individuals and/or in affirming their pricing to be independent of who or what those individuals are.” Stefan argues that the resentment of monetary value in practice “works out as elitism”: he considers the professor’s experiment “foolish liberal stuff” and “the show’s protest … childish.”[20]

Both Bertolt and the early Wilson focus on and showcase ordinary objects, characters, and lives, and ordinariness also applies to the mode of representation. Bertolt’s Galileo famously proclaims: “Unhappy the land where heroes are needed,”[21] and this sentiment is also voiced in some of his other plays. Bertolt rejected histrionics and overacting and favored clarity of presentation. Stefan writes about the “marvelously unpretentious matter-of-factness”[22] of Wilson’s Deafman Glance and takes away from it that “we need not strain to be extraordinary.”[23] He describes the movements of Wilson’s performers as “intense but relaxed”[24] and the “actions required [as] simple. They demand no unusual skills or exertions.”[25] Both Bertolt and Wilson, however, also estrange the familiar and ordinary. In his plays and productions, Bertolt employed Verfremdungseffekte, that is, devices and techniques to render seemingly familiar and ordinary objects, actions, or persons strange and therefore alterable. Estrangement of the ordinary in Wilson’s work takes a different form: Stefan points out that one “of the ways that Wilson puts ordinary life in the perspective of strangeness is with animals [i.e., animal performers and puppets on stage].”[26]

As alluded to in the statement by Heiner Müller quoted above, Bertolt aimed for “a radical separation of elements”—that is, of words, music, design, etc.—in his epic theatre,[27] and Stefan describes Wilson’s theatre in comparable terms: “In a disassociated manner various events occur. They are out of unrelated frames of reference. . . . conventions of representation are played off against one another.”[28] The structure of most of Bertolt’s plays is episodic and characterized by a dramaturgy of interruption to maintain the spectator’s focus on the moment-to-moment development of the plot instead of its outcome. Stefan characterizes Deafman Glance as a spectacle that is “divided into movements by a radical stop and go: successive endings, staged and experienced as true endings, followed by beginnings, staged and experienced as new beginnings,”[29] and he states that Wilson “has the gift of discontinuity. His figurations are discrete: he neither leads into them nor out of them.”[30]

Both Bertolt and Wilson favor a detached, unemotional, relaxed, and observant attitude of the performers towards their own performance on stage. Bertolt, for example, using classical Chinese theatre as a model, writes that the actor in this tradition “expresses that he knows that he is being watched”[31] and “observes himself.” When he represents a cloud, he “observes his own arms and legs, pointing them out, examining them and perhaps finally praising them.”[32] Wilson as a performer, according to Stefan, in his own productions “never seems tense, but seems continually aware of the whereabouts of every part of his body, seeming to relate to these parts […]. He leaves no doubt that as he stands there, he is conscious of himself as a performer.”[33] “Conventional theatre’s ostentatious indications of acting-on, being-affected by another” are absent in Wilson’s work.[34]

For Bertolt and the early Wilson alike, the performers’ relationship towards their performance is also supposed to instill an equally observant relationship to the performance in the spectators. Bertolt wants the spectator to develop the cool, critical, and detached attitude of the connoisseur (for example, of a sports fan) towards the actions on stage. Stefan, similarly, emphasizes that in Wilson’s Deafman Glance neither performance style nor staging “seem designed to evoke emotions in the spectator, but on the contrary to give no occasions for his passions to arise, but to calm him.”[35] Bertolt appreciates about classical Chinese Theatre that the “audience identifies itself with the actor” not through emotional identification but as “an observer, and accordingly develops the attitude of observing or looking on.”[36] He himself wants his spectators less to emotionally engage with the plot and feel empathy for the characters than to further their critical attitude toward both. Bertolt coined the term “complex seeing” for the audience’s ability to simultaneously think along with a play’s actions while also thinking about them at a meta-level: “thinking across the flow is almost more important than thinking in the flow.”[37] In his productions, this complex vision was facilitated by projections on screens, half curtains, or the laying bare of the technical apparatus. According to Stefan, the experience of watching Wilson’s Deafman Glance was simultaneously also “pervasively dual: we are watching images and performers creating images.”[38]

Bertolt was known for an open-ended creative process in which texts were rarely ever completed but often worked on and revised over several decades. With regard to Brecht’s works, Tom Kuhn has suggested that “we should try to conceive of an almost continuous and multi-stranded process of invention and development, which only came to any sort of rest or conclusion in particular completed ‘works’ when the opportunity happened to present itself.”[39] As for Wilson, Stefan mentions that “wholeness is not an ideal of his, but bothers him.”[40] In his early productions, Wilson frequently reused material from other projects—The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud repeating material from The King of Spain; The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin combining most of Freud with parts of Deafman Glance and KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, etc.[41]

Bertolt’s directorial understanding of mise-en-scène was similar to Denis Diderot’s notion of a theatre production as a succession of tableaus,[42] and this approach is also prominent in Wilson’s work. Bertolt aimed for stage compositions that would bring out what he called Gestus, by which he meant the social relations and attitudes of characters physically expressed and externalized through “posture, tone of voice and facial expression.”[43] As a recitable sign revealing the social positionality of each character, the Gestus needed to be legible—and this aspect of Bertolt’s work is particularly well documented in the photographic record of the modelbooks of his productions with the Berliner Ensemble. Wilson too, according to Stefan, told the actors in his early performances “to aim at the production of a clear image, one that reads well.”[44] In contrast to Bertolt, however, Wilson’s stage images, pulled from his unconscious and deliberately not interpreted, needed to be legible as strikingly enigmatic images, as symbols that even though they were “carrying symbol function, . . . [did] not function as symbols” and “mean[t] nothing.”[45] 

One notion closely related to Gestus in Bertolt’s theatre theory is Haltung (“attitude”), which combines “what is usually a mental state in English with embodied expression or an actor’s bearing.” Both Gestus and Haltung “are generated in and by the body,” with Gestus being “the smallest element of Haltung” and condensing “the dialectic of movement and balance.”[46] Both Gestus and Haltung are also related to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of Habitus as “a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception and action common to all members of the same group or class.”[47]

Without using the word explicitly, Stefan analyzes the Haltung not of any characters (of which there aren’t any in a traditional sense) in Wilson’s productions but of the members of his Byrd Hoffman School of Birds:

Byrds, generally white Protestants from upper middle class families, or assimilated to a WASP manner, are apt to be undemonstrative, unemphatic, reserved people, superficially cool and off-hand, not given to shows of emotion, generally keeping their feelings, if any, to themselves, rather carefully controlled in their conduct, with unexpressive faces and voices. . . . Generally well-read and -informed (and college graduates), they tend to be non-verbal, with few opinions, careful to avoid abstract terms, generalisations. . . .Politics is never discussed.[48]  

And Stefan also discusses the Haltung of other New York theatre companies with regard to the religious and class background that inform their work: “The ethos of . . . the Bread and Puppet theatre is Protestant and upper middle class, that of all forms of ‘ridiculous’ theatre is catholic and lower class, that of the Open Theatre, the Manhattan Project, the Living Theatre, the Performance Group is Jewish and middle class.”[49]  

Both Bertolt and Wilson developed what could be called “theatre pedagogies” in response to the alienation inscribed on the body through capitalist and bourgeois socialization. Bertolt developed Lehrstücke—learning plays—that were conceived of as training pieces for the self-orientation of participating performers, often non-virtuoso amateurs (“workers’ choruses, amateur dramatic groups, school choruses and school orchestras”[50]). As Bertolt remarked in a letter in 1956, his learning play “The Decision was not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers,”[51]  and he stated in a different context that “underlying the learning play is the expectation that the participant/player can be influenced socially by performing specific ways of taking action, assuming specific attitudes, reproducing specific dialogues, etc.”[52] By isolating, enacting, and criticizing specific postures and gestures relating to class conflict and power structures, the participants could learn to perform them differently and recognize, deconstruct, and refashion their own socially shaped social Gestus and Haltung. Stefan, in comparison, writes about Wilson’s work with the untrained members of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds that he “has found a way to do great theatre precisely with not just totally unskilled people, but with people peculiarly unfit to perform” and argues that Wilson’s physical workshops and group sessions helped his performers to transmute “their painful impotence . . . into the grade and dignity of an individuality as it is.”[53]  One could say that Wilson’s workshops contributed to a deconditioning of the Haltung of his group members by alleviating the socially conditioned fear of “acknowledging one’s identity with one’s body.”[54]  Stefan writes: “Participating in Wilson’s sessions, one realizes that a specific inhibition underlies the common sense, decency, economy of normal adult movement: an object-less fear . . . felt in permanency, so regular a state of muscular inhibition one is not conscious of it.”[55]  Stefan’s own participation in Wilson’s sessions left him with a “certain appreciable rather lasting elation and increased ease”  with his own body.[56]

One of Stefan’s major claims about Wilson’s early work is that it is focused on individuality—as opposed to personality. Stefan claims that for “individuals to reveal themselves was probably his original theatrical intention.”[57]  This may first seem in strong opposition to Bertolt’s work and his rejection of the ideology of individualism, but a closer look reveals similarities of both approaches. Stefan contends that, in Wilson’s theatre, there “are no ‘characters,’ the performers do not imitate, impersonate or represent personalities,”[58]  and emphasizes that Wilson, for his shows, “does not pick particularly beautiful or graceful, nor strange-looking people, but aims at a diversity of appearance within the range of conventional appearance,—‘just people.’.”[59]  Stefan argues that in

modern times,—during the bourgeois epoch,—people have tended to identify themselves . . .in terms of . . . an integration . . . of will and consciousness into a peculiar functioning whole, and the arts . . . have tended to represent people in terms of it, viz. as PERSONS possessed of a PERSONALITY or PERSONAL IDENTITY. I believe that. . . individuality or individual identity are something else.[60] 

The notion of personality rejected by Stefan is similar to the concept of the individual attacked by Bertolt: what Stefan embraces as the individual (Individuum), his father conceives of as the “dividual” (Dividuum).[61] Stefan’s statement that “[b]ureaucratisation and proletarianization have made personality seem pointless,—no identity”[62] echoes his father’s notion of the “dividual” as equally lacking a unified and coherent identity. Instead of conceiving of the masses from the point of view of the individual, the individual should be conceived of from the point of view of the masses: “And it is precisely the divisibility of the individual that should be emphasized (as belonging to several collectives).”[63] To Stefan, the identity-less individual he associates with Wilson’s work is in a state of “becoming,” in a constant process of “self-actualisation,” inhabiting the Gertrude Steinian temporality of an “eternal present . . .  experienced as all there, at the moment,—not as having a reality before or after.”[64]

Stefan argues that the “awareness of the performers’ individuality in Wilson’s theatre replaces the awareness of a personality (or . . . a character) represented by an actor.”[65]  However, the spectator becomes aware of the performers’ individualities not because Wilson’s direction highlights and isolates specific performers as extraordinary but because his performers move collectively without a concern about appearances, easily following their own bodies’ kinetic impulses while being sensitive and attuned to the movements of the other performers on stage. Stefan describes the counter-intuitive effect that, despite Wilson’s encouragement of his performers not to show themselves as individuals on stage, “a powerful communication,—of individualities,—results.”[66] 

Similar to Bertolt’s epic theatre, the spectators, “not the performers, have to be the active party”  in Wilson’s productions.[67] Stefan writes that in Wilson’s theatre “there are so many things happening simultaneously, we cannot dwell on everything, but have to search, select, focus, in order to see, mere looking won’t do.”[68]  Stefan applies a predominantly psychological vocabulary to describe the attention-raising and -expanding processes in Wilson’s work that would have been alien to his father. Bertolt’s goal is to turn his audiences into critical spectators who translate their awareness of the social issues represented on stage into political action beyond the theatre: “The attitude is a critical one. . . . [W]e hand the world over to their brains and hearts for them to change as they see fit.”[69] The early Wilson, by contrast, is interested in awareness not as a cognitive and intellectual but a pre- as well as un-conscious sensory and creative potential to be fully actualized: “Looking becomes imagination.”[70]  The “extended expositions and repetitions, the silence and the slow movements, the unaccented evenness with which new things appear, and above all the self-sufficient concreteness of the individual images” in Wilson’s productions “liberate our awareness”[71] by eroding our “perceptual acquisitiveness,” relaxing “our analytic, identifying, retentive propensities,”[72]  and circumventing “the ego-structure of perception.”[73] Similar to Bertolt’s vision of “a type of performance that will keep the spectator’s mind free and mobile”[74] to allow for the critical awareness and viewership of the audience unimpeded by emotional identification, Wilson’s work, according to Stefan, provides a “loosening-up exercise for the mind,” and the “free movement of . . . awareness” encouraged by this exercise makes “awareness itself. . . a medium of enjoyment and even awareness.”[75]  This brings to mind Friedrich Schiller’s notion of art as providing the “highest pleasure” defined as the “freedom of the mind in the vivacious play of all its faculties”[76]—except that in Wilson’s theatre, different from Schiller, the transformation of the “sensual world . . . into a free creation of the spirit” is not about controlling the “material word through ideas.”[77] Wilson’s early theatre is thoroughly grounded in the body, not in ideas or idealism—but also not in Bertolt’s materialism—and that applies to the notion of awareness as well. Awareness as a “medium of enjoyment” is conceived of in physical terms, as a dynamic energetic potential. The “loosening-up exercise for the mind” that a Wilson production aims to provide to the spectator is “of the same sort as the physical free motion exercises by which Wilson trains and prepares his performers.”[78] Stefan argues that “somewhat like spectators in normal theatre [who] may emphatically share the feelings of characters,” the spectators in Wilson’s theatre mimetically share in the performer’s “group-aware bodily self-awareness.”[79]  His audience becomes aware of their awareness not as an act of intellectual recognition or self-reflection but “as an energetic state . . . of participation,”[80] with the “modification of the spectator’s awareness” occurring in three steps: from observing the “things the performers are doing” and “sensing their movements,” to contemplating the “images produced by what the performers are doing,” to getting in touch with and participating in the “process of creative energy producing the fluctuating imagery.”[81] A comparable modification of the spectator’s awareness in Bertolt’s theatre would more likely move from a critical observation of the characters’ moment-by-moment choices (and the options rejected in each case) to a consideration of alternative solutions to the translation of these solutions into political action outside the theatre.

One key to stimulating and liberating the audience’s awareness in Wilson’s early theatre, according to Stefan, is the dream logic and content of his images: “the presence of fantasy-elements . . . , the show’s composition out of images . . . , [the] manner of development,”[82]  etc. The “cumulative effect” especially of the enigmatic characters in Deafman Glance “suggests the presence of emblems in life . . . which carry purpose and true meaning indifferent to us and not to be comprehended by us.”[83] . Different from Freudian psychoanalysis, however, the “dream is uninterpretable. Life is a language without denotation.”[84]  This notion is closer to Franz Kafka and Antonin Artaud than to Bertolt.

Stefan argues that “Wilson’s theatre is dream-like because it makes us suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness,” including the “principles of discontinuity and uniformity.”[85]  For example, “we don’t see a wall until we have supplemented an unseen house that makes it a wall,”[86]  and “we attribute to objects of experience a minimal completeness even in cases where actual experience does not positively warrant this.”[87]  As a result, “waking perception . . . never perceives anything changing—in space or in time. Its world is discontinuous.” Wilson’s theatre is closer to sleeping than waking consciousness, according to Stefan, because it doesn’t invoke “a single world in which things happen uniformly” and fails “to assume that before something can be something else it must have ceased to be what it is.” In Wilson’s theatre, “we perceive things changing into other things. From moment to moment and place to place one form goes into and turns out another,”  which implies a fusion and blurring of forms.[88]

Bertolt, with his dialectical-materialist as well as Taoist outlook, also strongly embraces the possibility of change at any given moment, but as a discontinuous change from one set and established state to another. One example would be his poem “Everything Changes,” which includes the lines

A new beginning

Is possible with your last breath.

But what happened, happened. And the water

You poured into the wine, you can

No longer pour out.[89]

A new beginning is always possible, but only if it is based on the acknowledgement of the determinate earlier state left behind (“what happened, happened”).

According to Stefan, sleeping consciousness conceives of dream objects in varying modes of non-identity. The identity of “individuals, acts, events, or situations” in dreams is either over- or under-determined but rarely self-identical. In one passage, he refers to his father as an example of the over- or under-determined identity of the dream object typical for the sleeping consciousness: “When I meet my father in my dream, I have no doubt of his identity, but at the same time, there is nothing about my identification that would preclude that figure from not only being something else, but from not being my father.”[90]  Bertolt’s indeterminate identity in his son’s dream makes him a figure more likely to appear in Wilson’s theatre than in his own, which Stefan seems to equate with conventional theatre:

Whereas conventional theatre so fashions the appearances acted out as to suggest real people whose appearances they are and to which, through the appearances, we are to relate, Wilson’s theatre makes us relate to the appearances created only: in themselves, as phenomena; and so fashions them that we perceive them as possibly other alternatives, intrinsically ambiguous, of multiple identity, non-self-identical, as definitely incomplete and inconsistent.[91]

Even though Bertolt also rejects the illusionism of realism and the audience’s engagement with supposedly real people qua identification with their appearances, he equally rejects the Nietzschean reduction of the phenomenal world to mere appearance. He wants his audience to become aware of and interrogate the appearances created by capitalist ideology and commodity fetishism—not as phenomena without any underlying material reality but as disguises of an economic system effectively concealing its mode of operation. Bertolt doesn’t want to suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness listed by his son—“efficient causation,” “discontinuity,” uniformity,” “substance” and “self-identity”[92]—but to change the socio-economic reality in which they are at work. His “dividual,” by default, involves incomplete and inconsistent, multiple and non-self identities, but they result from social, not unconscious forces and processes, and are discontinuous and separate, not in flux and morphing into each other. The multiple identities of the “dividual” co-exist but do not merge. The Fabel of Bertolt’s play The Good Person of Szechwan,[93] for example, involves the impossibility of the altruistic protagonist Shen Teh to ever transform into Shui Ta, her invented capitalist alter ego, in the presence of other characters, and even the change of Shen Teh into Shui Ta in front of the curtain during a song interlude maintains the discreteness of the identities of the two characters as well as the performer. In any case, Stefan’s dream example can be understood as a critique of his father’s notion of the indeterminacy of identity as not going far enough.

Overall, both Wilson’s and Bertolt’s theatre are about the rejection of the world as it is. Stefan repeatedly states that Wilson’s theatre, in a utopian sense, “makes us feel that anything might happen,”[94] and according to Bertolt, “things won’t stay the way they are.”[95] The work of both Wilson and Bertolt is about the liberation from oppression, but they mean different things by it. As discussed above, Wilson’s early productions may be unemotional, but Stefan argues that their themes (in the case of Deafman Glance: death, murder, and rebirth) are “emotionally highly ‘charged’” and that the emotional content of these themes (“anxiety”) and their concomitant feelings (“from vague perturbation through fear to dread, horror and terror”) are suppressed.[96]  Even though Stefan concedes that Wilson’s early spectacles only have a Fabel to the extent that it has been fully “subvert[ted] into imagery,”[97] (120), they still reflect a particular viewpoint, namely the viewpoint of a “self-contained . . . boy child, autistic in the eyes of an adult world continually busy in a make-believe show of exchange of affect and intelligence. . . . The shows are like that child . . . . Their hidden violence is his suppressed rage.”[98]  Stefan implies that Wilson, who early in his career worked with children, is invested in “the personal liberation of the stunted or repressed vital energies of children”[99]  that have been killed off, physically and spiritually, by family and society.[100] 

Bertolt’s theater, on the other hand, is about liberation from oppression by a capitalist system. His main themes are also highly emotionally charged (exploitation of labor, the ruthless pursuit of business interests, the impossibility of being a “good person” under the conditions of capitalism, etc.), and his work also suppresses, deflects, and estranges the associated emotions (most famously, in Mother Courage’s silent scream in response to her son’s execution offstage), but he does this in order to allow the audience to detach themselves emotionally from the situations portrayed on stage so that they can think critically about them. If Bertolt’s plays, much like Wilson’s early productions, are motivated by a sublimated emotion—anger at social injustice—this emotion is not grounded in childhood trauma and articulated in a far less personal manner.

Most of the formal similarities of Wilson’s early work with Bertolt’s theatre aesthetics also continued in Wilson’s later work and often became even more pronounced: the separation of elements, the use of interruption, the clarity of gestures and stage compositions, the quotation of elements from earlier productions in later ones, etc. Collaboration, always a key aspect of Bertolt’s work, was already important in Wilson’s early productions but intensified and became more relevant and wide-ranging later on. Even after he began directing classical and modern plays and working with professional actors, dramaturgs, and playwrights, often in Europe, Wilson not only continued to use and expand his extensive repertoire of estranging staging techniques but also to push them further than Bertolt had. Despite the fact that Theatre of Visions includes very few direct—and mostly critical—references to Bertolt’s work, Stefan does convey the sense of a strong resonance—and of differences in that resonance—between his father’s theatre theories and Wilson’s early productions.