The mainspring in my biological clock is cracked. Robert Wilson did it. Twelve hours—7 p.m. to 7 a.m.— watching his monstrous invention, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. Which has almost nothing to do with Joseph Stalin and almost everything to do with theatrical life and times, time . . . no, the plural is right. I give you numbers; it’s absurd, but necessary. One hundred forty actors, 200 roles, twice as many costumes, 40 ostriches and 40 Aunt Jemimas, megatonnage of scenery, and over 80,000 half-seconds of time, each ticked off by five or ten human chronometers at once. It doesn’t serve: I can’t express Stalin’s scope, unless the magazine itself were a billboard and wired for neon in four dimensions. Yet gigantism is irrelevant: ultimately the lead-in to a joke. As if the mushroom cloud were painted on a 10,000-foot-high flat over Nagasaki and held there by guy wires. Robert Wilson is a genius. Robert Wilson, my God. An insurance salesman’s name: part of the invention, I suspect. The man should be immense and crooked and called Claes Oldenburg or Pablo Picasso. Stalin is the most significant theatrical act since Cro-Magnon men first mimed their kills. I am stunned and excited. And, I feel, stupidly inarticulate.
Imagine a huge orrery. Pluto moving on the circumference as though it had no motion; Mercury a speed blur at center. Act One of Stalin: a track suited man runs across the stage. Sometime later he returns. He will run back and forth for 12 hours. Down front a human tortoise starts stage left: it will take the tortoise 90 minutes to cross. A boy sits enthroned and motionless: the sun, to carry out my weak analogy. In between, weird semi-people move at different speeds—but all, except the track star, slower than life. Wilson’s characters are planetary, cometary; they have separate orbits, they seldom touch. But they do form mad conjunctions and a terrific gravitational pull-push occurs onstage. It drags your eyes; it drags your viscera. It makes you breathless and tense.
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