‘KNEE’ DEEP IN PLAYS BY WILSON

Los Angeles hasn’t had much chance to judge the work of America’s most celebrated theater innovator, Robert Wilson.

True, Wilson’s uncharacteristically modest “I was sitting on my patio . . . “ paid a brief visit to town in 1977, and a few were able to see his preliminary sketch of “Lear” at UCLA in 1985. But “The Knee Plays,” opening at the Doolittle Theater on Tuesday, will be L.A.’s first chance to see echt Wilson firsthand.

“The Knee Plays” were originally created for his epic international collaboration, “the CIVIL warS,” which notoriously failed to appear at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival for lack of a million dollars or so of local funding.

Working with choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi and composer David Byrne, Wilson devised 13 short episodes to be performable on a shallow stage in front of a curtain while stagehands were resetting the stage for the next major tableau.

Last week, “The Knee Plays” began an American tour at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. After Wilson’s larger works, their transparency and lightness takes some getting used to. But they are not merely a string of visual bonbons. Like each of the five acts of “CIVIL warS,” they have their own throughline.

I caught up with Wilson himself at Brooklyn Academy, deep in technical rehearsals for the American debut of Act V of “the CIVIL warS” (the Rome section). He recalled:

“I’d known right along that I would have knee plays between each section of each act, but I didn’t have any notion what they would be. Then I was in France and I had the idea of people in the sky: Henry the Fourth of France, Don Quixote, various historical characters.

“Then I thought, ‘Well, maybe a prehistoric bird could fly in and put the first person into the sky, and the bird would be from the knee play that came before--that would help me.’ And later, one night in Freiburg in Germany, a group of people were talking, and--it happened very quickly--I just made up this story:

There was a tree, and it was cut down, and some people made a boat of it.

And the boat goes on a voyage and is marooned on some rocks.

And graffiti are written on it. And later the boat is found under a jungle and people read the graffiti and peel the bark off and make a book out of it. And later a man sees the book in a library in Scotland and begins to read it.

And from the book a tree grows.

The overall “look” of “The Knee Plays” is distinctly Japanese. The forms we see on stage look like folding toys built on the modular framework of a paper shoji screen. The “lion” which chases a “man” (a giant golden puppet operated by three visible handlers in the manner of Bunraku puppeteers) is a spiky-haired woman garbed and made up like a Kabuki actor.

But the sound is not Japanese at all. Byrne’s spoken text, written quite independently of Wilson, sounds very like the idiot savant lyrics of his early songs with the band Talking Heads, while the music (played by Les Miserables Brass Band) is strongly reminiscent of stomping New Orleans street jazz of the pre-Dixieland period.

Such juxtapositions may seem arbitrary, but they are of the essence of “the CIVIL warS,” which Wilson quite seriously and calmly characterizes as portraying “the struggle of mankind through time.” The work is Wilson’s “Live Aid” or “Hands Across America”: an imaginative incantation intended to summon up a common spirit of humanity.

The world may never see “the CIVIL warS” in one piece. “It’s--right now--resting,” Wilson says. “It exists; it’s all been developed and rehearsed; I could do it now, if there was a producer. Because I don’t want to produce it myself, which I was doing before. It feels wonderful now--to be without that obligation.”

His calendar is booked until the spring of 1990. There’s another “Alcestis” in Stuttgart, a “Lear” in Hamburg, a country-Western musical based on Tom Waits tunes for Munich, a six-hour drama about Franz Kafka for Berlin.

Glimmering down at the end of the tunnel is a possible production of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungend” for Vienna in 1990. Wagner spent 23 years working over the “Ring” off and on, and finally built an opera house of his very own to present the work. Could there be a Bayreuth in Wilson’s future?

He shrugs off the suggestion with a laugh. There may be a touch of the megalomaniac in the creator of 12-hour “operas,” but it’s megalomania with a sense of humor. “I remember once hearing my mother talking on the phone when I was about 14. ‘Oh, I don’t worry about Bob,’ she said: ‘Bob’s always got a project.’ ”

Strolling back toward the Brooklyn Academy after lunch, Wilson recalls another phone call from a writer in Boulder, Colo.

“She asked me, ‘What’s “The Knee Plays” about?’ I started in, ‘It’s about this tree’ and so on. When I finished, she said, ‘Oh, Mr. Wilson, it’s all so mysterious and clear at the same time!’ ”