STAGE WIRE : MORE MIXED REVIEWS FOR ‘CIVIL warS’

Embargoed last summer from Los Angeles, Robert Wilson’s “the CIVIL warS” is reaching the United States piecemeal. Last weekend Boston’s American Repertory Theatre took on the segment of the work seen in Cologne last winter, now translated into English. As usual with Wilson, the reviews ranged from joyous to skeptical.

Kevin Kelly, the Boston Globe’s theater critic, was entranced with Wilson’s flow of dream images (Frederick the Great rolling onto a Civil War campground in the back seat of a circa 1900 touring car), while Richard Dyer, the Globe’s music critic said: “Wilson has genius but lacks taste.” Arthur Friedman of the Boston Herald also had his doubts. “It isn’t easy to judge whether the advent of Robert Wilson in Boston is the second coming or the second conning.”

Sylviane Gold of the Wall Street Journal was rhapsodic. “Beautiful to look at, fascinating to listen to, and impossible to think about in any way that we were once accustomed to thinking about theater.”

Washington Post dance critic Alan Kriegsman was semi-enraptured. “There are lapses and saggings, but it’s . . . an experience that, while only dimly explicable in rational terms, generates tremendous wonder, surprise and feeling.”

John Rockwell, the New York Times’ man-of-all-media, had special praise for the text, written by Wilson and East German playwright Heiner Mueller. “The larger civil strife among and within nations is contrasted with the tensions of the family, and the connections are made with an intellectual coherence that Mr. Wilson has not previously achieved.”

The radio and TV critics pronounced it a bore. We’ll have a firsthand report on “the CIVIL warS” in Boston in Sunday’s Calendar.

Washington’s Folger Theatre, on the verge of folding after this season, has won a reprieve. The trustees of Amherst College will continue to provide support for the theater for the next two years, with the help of an anonymous donor. By that time it’s hoped that a major fund-raising effort will have borne fruit.

But Santa Cruz’s Bear Republic Theater wasn’t able to raise the $50,000 it needed to help with its debt, and has closed its doors permanently.

The announcement that Gordon Davidson has signed on for three more years as artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum takes him out of contention as the new leader of the revived Lincoln Center Repertory Company. The betting in New York now is on Gregory Mosher, artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Martha Graham: “If dance dies or fails, it will not be because of the audience. It will be a corruption from within--that the standard is not high enough, not demanding enough and that what you see on the stage is not ravishing enough.”