Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken

Robert Wilson’s aesthetics and opinion of Ibsen make him seem like a curious choice to direct an Ibsen play. However, to Robert Brustein—founding artistic director of American Repertory Theater and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard – Wilson was the perfect choice to direct When We Dead Awaken at ART in 1991. For decades, Brustein’s aim as an educator, critic, scholar, and producer was to, as told fo me in an interview, “draw Ibsen away from realism.”(2) Brustein titled his essay arguing for a non-causal view of Ibsen’s work “Theatre in the Age of Einstein: The Crack in the Chimney.” As this title, with its reference to Einstein suggests—it was Robert Wilson’s aesthetic worldview embodied in Einstein on the Beach that epitomized an approach to theatre that Brustein wanted applied to Ibsen. He urged theatre-makers to find “the poem inside Ibsen’s plays,” and it was this view of Ibsen he inculcated in his students at Harvard.(3)

Wilson had directed works at ART three times before. In 1986, Brustein invited him to direct Euripides’s Alcestis. It was the first time Wilson directed a classical dramatic text. As Brustein stated, “Robert Wilson was ideally suited for directing When We Dead Awaken because he can’t think in a linear fashion. It’s impossible for him. He thinks in terms of images.” (4)

Robert Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken in an adaptation by Robert Brustein with musical knee plays by Charles “Honi” Coles played at ART from February to March 1991 and continued to the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in May and to São Paulo, Brazil, in October of that year. (5) This paper sheds light on the development of that production. An archival video of the of the work is available to view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and ART’s archive

Surprisingly, it was not Brustein who came up with the idea of having Robert Wilson direct Ibsen’s rarely produced final play. Rather, it was one of his directing students at Harvard - Mary Sutton - who made the suggestion to Brustein upon leaving his Modern Drama lecture about When We Dead Awaken. (6) Brustein described his phone conversation with Robert Wilson to pitch the show: “When I described Ibsen’s last play to Bob over a crackling long-distance line to Germany, he immediately agreed to direct it, though he hadn’t yet read it.” (7) It is not at all surprising that Wilson agreed to direct the play solely based on a description of it. His process when directing texts is often to have someone synopsize the work for him as he sketches and takes notes. (8) Furthermore, Brustein’s interpretation of the play as an image-laden, non-realistic work surely captured Wilson’s imagination. Wilson described his initial reaction to reading the play: “[I] was immediately drawn to it. It’s a play that’s strange, mysterious, and something we can’t completely understand. There was something I just couldn’t put my finger on. I don’t like things I can understand. If I understand something, I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t interest me.” (9) ART would go on to market Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken as follows:

Rubek, an aged sculptor [played by Alvin Epstein and in Brazil by Joel Gray], vacations with his young, dissatisfied wife, Maya [Stephanie Roth], at a mountain spa. Irene, his former model and a patient at the local sanitarium [played simultaneously by both Elzbieta Czyzewska and longtime Wilson collaborator Sheryl Sutton (10)], seeks revenge on him for having used her to create his greatest work while rejecting her selfless love. Rubek realizes that he has sacrificed his soul for the sake of his art, and Maya runs off to cavort with Ulfheim, a bear hunter [Mario Arrambide]. Rubek and Irene ascend to the mountaintop only to be killed by an avalanche. (11)

Creating the Adaptation

With Wilson signed on to direct, Brustein began writing the adaptation in consultation with Wilson. However, ART’s literary director Robert Scanlan recalled that: 

Wilson over and over wished that he could do the play without text at all. His instinct with When We Dead Awaken has been to express this work through massive elemental forms—the mountains in each of the three acts, the water of the sea in the first act, and the water of the mountain brook in the second act, the snowstorm which “whites out” the finale of the play—and minimize the play’s dependence on words. The play does not strike Wilson to be about what people say. (12)

Brustein, however, insisted that Wilson use Ibsen’s text and wrote an adaptation half the length of the original without “excising anything vital to the action, the characters, or the theme.” (13) He incorporated preliminary cuts made by the director and honored Wilson’s dislike of the “ping pong” of conventional dialogue. Wilson prefers his actors focus on their lines and not on the need to respond to the other actor in the scene. Brustein’s adaptation “set about rendering Ibsen’s strange, occasionally verbose play into a kind of suggestive English [he] hoped might spark Wilson’s imagistic imagination.” (14)

In rehearsal, Wilson made further cuts. Brustein explains that Wilson wanted to cut “the line ‘When we dead awaken, what? We discover that we never lived.’ A very important line. He did not want the title in the play. I [Brustein] fought him hard on this, and [I] managed to get a compromise which left most of it in.” (15) Ultimately, Wilson placed the title in bold multicolored hand lettering on the white stage curtain, and it became part of the second of three song-and-dance knee plays performed at first by Charles “Honi” Coles and Alvin Epstein’s Rubek. They were then joined by the entire cast with the knee play evolving into a tap number. They sang “Yes, we fell in love, yes we fell in love, yes we fell in When We Dead Awaken,” repeating “When We Dead Awaken” as they shuffled off the stage. (16) Rather than cutting the line entirely as Brustein feared, Wilson turned the title into a musical number.

The knee plays were created by Charles "Honi" Coles, a legendary tap dancer and blues singer/songwriter whom Wilson cast in the role of The Manager of the Spa. He and Wilson also collaborated that year on Mr. Bojangles' Memory, Og Son of Fire a short musical film which included some music from the show’s knee plays and was presented at The Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the Festival d’Automne. (17)

A knee play is Wilson’s term for a short vaudevillian routine which he uses in his work to introduce an act. Knee plays serve, for him, as joints linking the show together, and function either as a commentary or in counterpoint to the tone of the play. In the first knee play, Charles “Honi” Coles came onstage and sang a song which begins:

I was alone when I met her

Now I wish I was alone.

I wasn’t doing so bad

But she came along and now

everything is wrong

I met her and I wish I never had. (18)

As Coles, sitting in a yellow chair and dressed in a white suit, sang a song which resonated with the act’s theme, Elzbieta Czyzewska, who performed the first of two Irenes Wilson had play the part, “appeared in a glittering one–piece bathing suit, high heels, and one long red glove to do a Betty-Grable-from-behind cheesecake number,” (19) as one critic described it. Such critics mocked the knee plays as dismissive of Ibsen and just attempts to lighten things up. However, it makes complete sense that Irene who says later in the play, “I worked in nightclubs” (20) would be performing in such a number. In his attention to the details of the text, Wilson honored an element of the character’s history through this knee play. Instead of proving Wilson’s disregard for Ibsen’s text, the knee play underscored Wilson’s deep understanding of it. 

Act three was preceded by the final knee play. In this one, Sheryl Sutton, who played the shadow-like second Irene, was in a bathrobe smoking on the side of the stage as Coles gradually walked to a metal hospital bed in front of the “When We Dead Awaken” curtain as he sang a mournful blues song featuring the line: 

“Unless you’ve lived it, felt its misery, joy

You can’t understand L-O-V-E, the doggonest feeling ever.” (21)

Wilson maintained the theme of love established earlier, but endowed it with a more serious, mournful tone, foreshadowing death in the final act.

The First Workshop

The production process for a Wilson work is a long one. There were two workshops which preceded rehearsal. With Brustein’s adaptation in hand, the first workshop took place over five days in July 1990 and focused on developing the design concept of the show and the visual storytelling. It began, as Stage Manager Abbie Katz described, with the production team sitting in Robert Brustein’s office, “reading the script several times, stopping whenever anyone had a question, a thought, or a visual association to offer. While we read, Bob sketched.” (22) As scenic and costume designer, John Conklin notes: 

We discussed Ibsen’s life, personality, and a wide range of topics—the conversation veered from Brecht to Beckett to World War I. Bob Wilson listened, absorbed, and then drew and drew and drew. Bob thinks with his hands, a pencil, and a blank sheet of paper. Ideas, dreams, images, furniture, skies, mountains, trees, water, and an avalanche all emerged. (23)

By the second day Wilson and Conklin were requesting visual and literary sources based on the previous day’s discussion. “The office walls are covered with pictures and images—the Grand Canyon, Ibsen walking the streets of Oslo, an Alpine hut, mountains and glaciers in Greenland, Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.” (24) Assistant Dramaturg Dorthee Hannappel provides an example of the impact Dore’s illustrations had on Wilson’s designs, explaining: “One of these engravings particularly intrigued Wilson while he was sketching several versions of a stone chair [which Rubek sits on] in the second act. The picture shows a steep, tall rocky cliff. Looking at it carefully, Wilson transformed the shape of the cliff into the shape of the stone chair he was working on.” (25)

Each day Wilson and Conklin would work together, with Conklin building models of every possible design Wilson sketched. The most central element of theatre for Wilson is light (26), and lighting designer Steve Strawbridge used a few lights with colored gels to provide a sense of a lighted set. As Conklin described it:

What begins to emerge is a series of dream-like evocations of Ibsen’s brooding world of the mountains of Norway—rendered principally in black, white and gray. They become the essence of the psychological drama of the play, not an illustration of it. Bob creates an alternate reality—vision and movement divorced from surface narration. He uses juxtaposition and irony to liberate the text from its weight and density. . . . So this last, symbolic, heavy dream of Ibsen about failure, frustration, death, and resurrection will have a show curtain in bright vivid colors—red, blue, yellow letters striding and dancing across a pure white background. (27)

It is noteworthy that Conklin discusses “the psychological drama of the play” in relation to Wilson’s design for the production. Wilson is known for his anti-naturalistic aesthetic which is not concerned with psychology, at least not in the conventional sense. But in Conklin’s opinion, Wilson does deal with the psychological drama on his own terms through the visual world he creates rather than by working with the actors. 

As Conklin understands it, Wilson is simply choosing alternative modes to tell the story—modes which perhaps honor the mystery of Ibsen’s creation more than a naturalistic approach would. By the final day of the workshop Robert Wilson and his collaborators had a “clear outline of the set that Bob envisioned for the production.” (28)

The Second Workshop

The second workshop occurred over two weeks in October of 1990, during which Wilson worked with the entire cast and developed the staging. In addition, the designers were present to see how the staging would affect their designs. As alluded to above, Wilson’s work with actors is very different from a conventional rehearsal process. As Wilson discussed with ART News: 

Normally actors start by talking about character and motivation; discussing what is going on in the play as preparation for rehearsals where development of relationships and the telling of the story are the primary objective. With Wilson, none of this takes place. Actors are told where to go, what to do (this includes unexplained gestures and poses), and when to speak (usually uninflected in early rehearsals). Wilson also told the actors, “I’m not the type of director who is interested in psychology. Knowing where you are going, that’s the main thing. Keep it very simple. Beneath it all it can be very complicated, but let theatre always be about one thing and keep that very simple.” (29)

Essentially Wilson’s movement score creates a mask for the actors that is rigidly set and quite complicated to master, although it keeps things “simple.” On top of this score Wilson layers on the text at specific moments. The article explains: 

Actors must take extensive notes on their timing of the text to movement. No explanations are given about what any of these things may mean. Wilson likes, in early rehearsals, to explore what he calls “the tensions and the structure of the space.” He likes to start early because, as he says: “The visual book should be able to stand on its own. Space is texture and structure—something that can’t be talked about” . . . Wilson has said that a line of text should not interrupt the silence and that “when you finish a line, it doesn’t end, it continues into silence.” (30)

Once the actors have learned the choreography and where to say their lines, they can fill the rigid form he has provided them. There can be great freedom for the actor within this structure. Wilson is not interested in why the actors do what they do; he just wants them to do it. “I don’t want to know why I’m doing something. That’s why my theatre is different, noninterpretive. Interpretation is for the audience.” (31) To an extent, the experience the actors have working on the piece is similar to Wilson’s aim for the audience’s experience. “He talks about giving the audience literal and mental space within the theatre piece to fill with their consciousness and feeling.” (32)

Trusting Wilson’s method was not always easy for the actors. In the stage manager’s production book for the actual production, I found a note to the actors that they must fully commit to Wilson’s non-naturalistic style and trust that it will work if they do. The note reprimanded the actors, saying that it only looked bad when they do not fully commit to his style. (33)

The second workshop ended with a Bauprobe, the building of a full-size mock-up of the set, which is rarely done in the United States. It is an example of how Wilson and ART introduced European production methods to the US theatre. The Bauprobe allowed Wilson and his designers to see how Wilson’s set would work in the actual space and to make adjustments, discuss props, etc. Having the actors there as well allowed the lighting designer to work with Wilson on the lighting before the start of rehearsals. This was a huge benefit considering that lighting is, for Wilson, the most important element, and the cues in his production are always painstakingly detailed and precise. The two workshops allowed Wilson and his company to have much of the intricate elements of his design and staging ready so that the relatively short rehearsal period was sufficient time for the production to open on schedule. 

Rehearsal 

Despite his wariness of text, Wilson did reinstate one of Brustein’s initial cuts. Taken from a dialogue from the start of the play between the aging sculptor Rubek and his young wife Maja as they sit at the spa recalling their train journey there:

Although absolutely nothing happened

I knew that we had crossed the border,

That we were really home again,

Because it stopped at every little station,

No one got off and no one got on,

But the train stood there silently,

For what seemed like hours.

At every station I heard two railmen

Walking along the platform—

One of them carrying a lantern—

And they mumbled quietly to each other

In the night, without expression or meaning,

There are always two men talking

About nothing at all. (34)

Wilson found this passage to be mysterious and poetic. He amplified this text’s mystery by recording and using it as a taped refrain at various points in the play. Dramaturg Robert Scanlan adapted the dialogue into a monologue in rehearsal to remove Wilson’s loathed ping pong of dialogue. His focus on and repetition of this text lends insight into what attracted him to When We Dead Awaken in the first place. Throughout his oeuvre, Wilson has had a penchant for train imagery, an interest in silence, and a lack of interest in words. Einstein on the Beach has a train scene at the beginning of the opera. In terms of content, this monologue is an expression of a world in which speech is not the primary mode of communication. “I heard two railmen / Walking along the platform.” It is the sound of walking which is initially heard and noted. When they finally speak, they “mumble quietly without meaning.” The dream-like quality of the play, this scene, and Wilson’s work in general are underscored in this text. Maja thought Rubek was asleep (in the realm of dreams) on the train, but he was hearing the silence around him. This Ibsen text can be understood as an expression of Wilson’s theatrical aesthetic, and his choice to reinstate the text opens a window into his work methods.

I would like to circle back now to the Wilson quote I opened with: “I don’t like most of Ibsen’s plays, Ibsen usually explains too much.” He continues:

But When We Dead Awaken is different. It’s so mysterious. Nothing is as beautiful as a mystery. I like this play because I don’t understand it. The minute you think you understand a work of art it’s dead. It no longer lives in you. This play lives on in the mind like a hallucination. It’s Ibsen’s dream play.” (35)

Following his rigorous engagement with Ibsen’s work at ART on When We Dead Awaken, Wilson would go on to direct two more Ibsen productions: Lady from the Sea and Peer Gynt along with countless productions of classic dramatic texts.