Labyrinthine Dream

By T.E. Kalem

The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin

by Robert Wilson

James Joyce once said that he expected his readers to devote their entire lives to his work. Texas-born, 29-year-old Robert Wilson seems to concur. For four performances only at Brooklyn's Academy of Music, he assembled a twelve-hour dramatic extravaganza that began at 7 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. It was a long day's night.

Stalin scants Stalin as well as conventional play making. It is a kind of lavish underwater ballet, a labyrinthine dream from which one cannot awaken, a slow-motion time study that makes the slow motion of, say, film or videotape seem like a device of dizzying speed.

Wilson's imagination is hallucinatory, evoking the visions of drug takers. It is also surreal. If Dali had not thought of a melting watch, Wilson could have. Stalin does not unfold through logic, but through phantasmagorical sequences, as if dancers were paradoxically miming still lifes.

Nymphs Cavorting. In one such segment, "The Cave," the stage is as loaded with animals as Noah's ark. Some are stuffed, some are simulated by actors (see cut), and some are real. Wilson is daft on animals, from ravens to ostriches, not excluding live dogs and sheep. In the cave the animals, cozy and docile, rest as if inhaling and exhaling the paradisiacal peace of Creation. Through the mouth of the cave, in bold, dazzling sunlight, we see girls bare to the waist, nymphs cavorting in primal innocence. Slowly, and with chilling ominousness, one wooden bar after another slams into place across the face of the cave, as if civilization were sundering these two worlds for all time to come. It is an expulsion from Eden.

Wilson is capable of hypnotically poignant cameos. A slim young black mother, dressed wholly in black except for narrow white cuffs at her wrists, wakes one of her nightgowned small children, pours and serves a glass of milk, then slays the child ritually with a glittering silver knife. She wakes the other child and repeats the action. Then she grieves for both with the same grave serenity with which she has killed them.

Wilson can also be funny. He mixes Gertrude Stein gibberish with high camp and low burlesque. One of the show's running gags is just that--a fellow in a red shirt and shorts who jogs rapidly across the back of the stage at intervals, always at a meticulously identical pace. At times this makes for sheer absurdity; at other times it seems almost like a mystical trance.

Some of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin is undeniably opaque, irritating, pretentious and self-indulgent. Few playwrights would have the nerve to stitch together a dramatic conglomerate as Wilson has done, containing portions of his previous works such as The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and Deafman Glance. But considering its sprawling length, Stalin is remarkably free from boredom. This is a token of its visual mesmerism and incessant variety. One moment the stern, noble mien of the aged Sigmund Freud will appear as he walks about the stage on his wife's arm in supportive dignity; the next moment, 32 dancing ostriches; and the next, Wilson's 88-year-old grandmother from Waco, Texas, in a walk-on, talk-on bit. Playwright or not -- chances are not -- Robert Wilson is a master showman magically deploying theatrical effects.

-- By T.E. Kalem

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