sarma

I couldn't make either performance of Robert Wilson's "The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud" so I went to the dress rehearsal, which was an event in itself -the work shot through and veiled over with glimpses of its own procedures and preparations. At a dress rehearsal, you are constantly aware of potential and actual as the one approaches or draws back from the other.

"Freud" is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's billed, as I remember, as a dance-drama: dance maybe as in "dance of life", drama as in the "human drama". Wilson works as a visual artist, arranging, combining and separating various realities in the stage space -an orchestrator of daily bodies and objects. Many of the realities that he deals with are simple -a man walking, a woman sitting, a boy lighting candies, but, viewed against each other, they become complex, charged with a special radiance. Other events are extraordinary, astonishing -like the four furred, clawed, floor-to-ceiling legs of an immense cat which stalk across the front of the stage in Act II.

There are what seem like hundreds of performers in "Freud" -children-men-women-animals of all ages-sizes-shapes. At the dress rehearsal, many of them were still getting to know each other. (High agitated calls: "Where's Jesse?" "Who's Jesse?" Or a woman crying "Hey, E. Z!" and a man telling her, "Her names's S.K.") Objects, lights, people often refused to function properly. As in every dress rehearsal, the quiet continuing event was surrounded with babble from time to time. It was fascinating to huddle in the middle and compare the scope, the tumult of the undertaking with the small intent activities ebbing and flowing on the stage.

Act I is an act of passage. The stage is divided into equal horizontal zones, each with its own discrete reality from moment to moment. The stage floor is covered with sand that sprays curling into the air when people pass through it. I can't begin to describe the people who pass through it. Here are some of them: Three bare-breasted people in tan levis who perform a gentle canon of movement exercises; a beautiful Negress in a severe black dress who does not pass, but sits in a chair with a stuffed raven on her wrist; a giant turtle (papier-maché manned by a little boy); an old woman alternately stretching and making cradles of her arms in some kind of extravagant elegy of loss; two people in bear suits; Kenneth King in a white suit stuffed to make him look very fat, prize-fight-dancing through; a runner passing continuously back and forth in the most upstage layer; numberless unremarkable, remarkable people. There are some astonishing events too: a snake-charmer is pulled into the flies by a rope, and, in return, a life-sized angel dummy with disintegrating cotton wings descends. A pair of feet tight-rope across on a batten high above the stage. At the end of the act, hordes of identically dressed "mammies" dance weavingly through -men, women, and a tiny child. Some are real blacks, some burnt-cork blacks, but they are all padded fore and aft like cliché Aunt Jemimas.

Act II is more an act of assembling and accumulating, and the layers of space acquire more scalloped contours. The scene is like a dark living room in some shabby rooming house. People sit and smoke; three standing men move pieces on a table in an arcane game; a woman somersaults in and carries on a chatty monologue, plays the piano ("Oh, E minor! That always sends chills up my spine."); one large woman sits in a miked chair whose every creak is beautifully amplified; a camel sticks its head in the door and retreats. Toward the end, almost everyone piles up on and around a ladder while armloads of hay are brought in; Wilson does a loose-limbed Aunt Jemima dance; the people walk off in a line; finally a mysterious figure (The King of Spain) who has been sitting, almost invisible, in a high-backed chair facing upstage rises and turns. He has a gigantic, bearded, wild-eyed humpty-dumpty of a head. Astonishment and terror at this messiah. The curtain falls.

Act III has a ritual quality -a Nativity that has been fractured and whose parts are floating tantalizingly about the stage like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle skidding away from your ordering hand. It seemed to me that the front part of the stage -a vast straw-heaped cave- was like one layer, while many layers were sometimes crowded into the sunny strip of beach visible outside the cave's mouth. Inside the cave, the King of Spain sits, the old woman (suggesting a shepherd, a Joseph) sits. Wild animals enter one by one; they are people in beautifully realistic suits and heads. Outside the cave, the changing scene has a surreal clarity, a violence of light. Bare-breasted people do something gently ritualistic with a real baaing lamb in front of a female figure with streaming false blond hair. Later those figures on the beach become a costumed panoply. By that time, vertical bars have fallen very slowly one at a time, slamming into the floor, gradually making the cave into a cage. Finally Freud enters (he has made three previous entrances, one in each act) and sits at a table on a chair that has slowly been lowered from above. He writes while the animals cluster about him and a little boy curled up on the floor whimpers (like a newborn baby? like a monkey?). Freud's young woman companion enters and stands over him; she has come in quickly, naturally, as if to say "Lunch is ready. Can you come now?" A white scroll of cloth rises from the pit, a suspended square of glass falls and shatters, the curtain falls.

I can describe these events, cannot get across the effect they have when viewed together. I cannot quite evoke the mysterious beauty of some of them. The unity, the inexplicably mythic dimensions of the work come from the way figures and events appear and reappear in the acts -sometimes in full focus, sometimes very briefly. There is always a runner. There is always a rope: in the first act it undulates upstage; in the other acts it is pulled out of things -the King, the haystack, the bears. The bars descend in each act, but their importance is clear only in the last. A tall, melancholy man with a fan, who crawls through the sand in Act I, drags lovesick through Act II wearing a walrus head. In Act III, he is in complete walrus suit, but still carries his fan and now walks upright.

There are many more events: Audrey Monk speaks an introduction; there are activities in intermission -wordless yowling, high screaming songs. I forgot the tumbleweeds that whisk across the stage in the very beginning. Oh, well . . . What I am trying to convey is the density and the gentle, surprising beauty of "The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud". The pace of each activity is tremendously slow and weighted, but new ideas are introduced with carefully theatrical timing. It is as if Wilson has encouraged each special individual to perform his part in his own way, but then surrounded them with supernatural happenings, crowned them with haloes, put ravens on their wrists and lambs in their arms. So it is like some pageant of living, studded with symbols from Christian mythology, pondered and observed by a tender and venerable Freud.