‘KNEE PLAYS’: MAGIC OF THE MIND

Robert Wilson has forced us to change our mind about theater. Wilson’s “The Knee Plays” will be at Doolittle Theatre through Sunday night, and it is as charming an introduction to his aesthetic as can be imagined: his Five Easy Pieces.

Actually, it’s 13 pieces, first intended to serve as divertissements between the sections of Wilson’s mammoth, aborted epic, “the CIVIL warS.” But they make sense on their own, spelling out a story that one might improvise for a child at bedtime. Once upon a time there was a man in a tree, and the tree turned into a boat, and the boat turned into a book. . . .

The story is not insisted on. It’s only there if you need it. Just as real purpose of the bedtime story is to release the child into sleep, Wilson’s pieces seek to quiet the viewer’s codifying brain and to put him into the contemplative state of a person watching a slow sunset. The moment is the meaning--plus whatever private thoughts may ensue.

This takes time--more than five hours for Wilson’s masterpiece, “Einstein on the Beach.” At the Doolittle he’s only got 90 minutes, The spell can’t be cast as deeply as it should be.

Still, we get the idea. Wilson’s theater is about the magic of the mind. Half of it we make up ourselves. His job is to provide the right cues.

The cues in “The Knee Plays” include a bare stage, often bathed in blue light; a set of white modules that will serve as tree, boat and book; a company of “dancers” in lab coats; and a startling score by David Byrne of Talking Heads.

To the eye, the piece suggests Japanese theater. The dancers move in a slow, controlled way, even when they’re turning somersaults. The building and the dismantling of the boat is a ritual. Time is taken between sections. (Too much time, on opening night.) The solemnity has its droll side, but we never forget that we’re watching a ceremony.

The “right” supporting music for such a piece would be light and dry, something with flutes and woodblocks. Byrne’s music matches the stateliness of Suzushi’s Hanayagi’s choreography, but its timbre is that of a gut-bucket New Orleans marching band on the way to a funeral.

The contrast is so sharp that it shocks both the ear and the eye into extra attention, another hallmark of Wilson’s work. Whatever his images mean, they’re always drawn sharply.

Some of Byrne’s music also has words, read by Matthew Buckingham. They don’t quite make sense. But they aren’t word salad either. A kind of story is transpiring here, too, set in a world of shopping carts and freeways, a place where “business is being done.”

The people in lab coats may represent that world. But their present business is to assist the story of the tree, the boat and the book--to turn the pages, as it were. They snap and unsnap the ark together. (It looks something a child might have drawn on graph paper.) They manipulate the great puppets: the golden-faced man and the flapping bird, which seems to be made of toothpicks. At one point the assistants lower themselves to the floor and begin to hop. A field of solemn lab assistants suddenly turned into toads! Poetic justice.

How to read “The Knee Plays” is up to the viewer. My companion saw the lab assistants as images of the factory of the future. I thought of helpers in a mental hospital. The T-shaped tree will certainly suggest Christ’s cross to many, particularly when the golden-faced rod puppet is held up before it.

The eerie bursts on the horizon when the tree falls are called “lighting” in the libretto. But I saw a nuclear war zone. And in the winter scene (the clearest reference to “the CIVIL warS,” with its two transparent tents) I didn’t see winter. I saw a beach in autumn. The cold would burn off as the sun took hold. (Heinrich Brunke did the lighting.)

“The Knee Plays” has changed a bit since it was first done at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1984. The lion who chases the man up the tree was then a “real” (i.e. paper) lion. Now she’s a dancer, a less playful image. I also missed the Walker’s pine Kabuki floor--which I may well be imagining. Wilson’s pieces give us just enough in the here and now to hold us; but their real work gets done in the mind’s eye.

“The Knee Plays” is a tantalizing sampler, but it’s time to have a full-scale Wilson piece in Los Angeles. At the time “the CIVIL warS” was canceled, Robert Fitzpatrick said that he’d make a Wilson work his first priority if he did another Los Angeles arts festival. But there’s no such work on Fitzpatrick’s preliminary schedule for the 1987 festival, announced Wednesday. (See story, Page 1.) If we can’t afford “Einstein on the Beach” or “the CIVIL warS,” how about Wilson’s staging of “Alcestis” for the American Repertory Theatre?

‘THE KNEE PLAYS’ A theater piece by Robert Wilson, with words and music by David Byrne, at the Doolittle Theatre. Presented by the UCLA Center for the Arts. Scenario Wilson. Direction Wilson. Choreography Suzushi Hanayagi. Lighting Heinrich Brunke. Musical director Frank London. Narrator Matthew Buckingham. With Frank Conversano, Denise Gustafson, Jeannie Hill, Carl House, Cho Kyoo-Hyun, Frabrizia Pinto, Satoru Shimazaki, Sanghi Wagner, Gail Donnenfeld, Charles Berg, Pablo Calegero, Matt Dariau, David Harris, Marcus Rojas, Jeanne Snodgrass. Plays Thursday-Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 7 and 10 p.m. and Sunday at 8 p.m. Closes Sunday. Tickets $6-$24. 1615 N. Vine St. (213) 825-9261.