MUSIC REVIEW : UCLA Introduces Glass’ Science-Fictitious ‘Airplanes’

Philip Glass’ super-trendy, hyper-pretentious, multi-medial, neo-minimalist, science-fictitious, deja-vu , deja-entendu , quasi-music drama--began rumbling and sputtering at 8:07 Monday night at the Wadsworth Theater, courtesy of the forward-looking folks at UCLA.

At least two hours later, one benumbed witness to this relentlessly momentous event (this benumbed witness) glanced furtively and guiltily as his wristwatch. It read 8:21.

That must mean something.

The official clock insists that the 1,000 futuristic planes actually completed their buzz-and-attack mission in only 90 minutes. That isn’t much by Wagnerian standards. It was, unfortunately, an eternity for certain stubbornly fossilized Wagnerites.

Say this for Glass and his earnest collaborators, the playwright David Henry Hwang and the designer Jerome Sirlin: They want to do a lot of things, and they want to do them with slick, painless, populist appeal.

In their not-so-magnum opus, which, not incidentally, received its first performance last summer in the more convivial confines of a Viennese airplane hangar, they want to invoke--or at least pull --the lofty shades of Kafka, Freud and Spielberg.

They also want to play with Josef Svoboda’s Laterna Magika. They want to babble in space-age shrinkology and dabble in the artificial glorification of tinnitus for all.

In their inadvertent celebration of easy banality, they have cranked out an endless stream of simple-minded movie-music cliches to accompany an endless monologue. The unisex platitudinous protagonist--on Monday it was the ever-intense Jodi Long--spends the evening describing her mental vicissitudes as she temporarily abandons metropolitan doldrums in favor of picturesque communion with the forces out there.

What forces out there? You know, those mysterious metaphysical voices and faces that turn the mundane into a quaint Technicolored nightmare. Oh dear, this brings up another close encounter with ambiguous obfuscation. This is where I came in.

E.T., call home. Better yet, go home. Use my Frequent Flyer card. . . .

Glass, in case you care, sets the inaction in motion deafeningly, with synthesized airplane noises. Soon, however, he reverts to his customary melodic doodles and jingle fragments, all repeated to the point of exhaustion and then repeated some more.

The basic electronic sounds, augmented by amplified winds and nonsense-syllabic soprano, emerge lush and pretty, for the most part. But they go nowhere.

Presumably they aren’t supposed to go anywhere. That’s the point or, as the case may be, the non-point.

Glass creates musical wallpaper to surround Hwang’s golly-this-isn’t-Kansas story. Rock looms crudely on the horizon, in mystical blurs, insistent beats and primitive harmonies.

The correlation between score and spoken word seems almost arbitrary. So does the correlation between musical affect and the accompanying emotional appeal. The librettist describes the heroine’s fluctuating mental states carefully, but the composer neither explores nor illustrates them.

Ultimately, “1000 Airplanes” is more interesting to watch than to hear. Even that isn’t saying a great deal.

Sirlin uses clever holographic projections on a little multi-level, multi-depth set to produce quixotic changes in perspective. With the flick of a button, he moves the haunted reciter--anyone for a little Sprechgesang ?--from the claustrophobia of urban blight to the pure idyllic escapism of the woods to the bleak all-purpose images of a classic-comic never-neverland.

One wonders what he might be able to do with a real challenge. Anyone for Wagner’s “Ring”? Or Tolkien’s? The prospect boggles.

Be that as it may, the hi-tech stuff here was nice. The show looked good, even in the cramped quarters at Wadsworth. The subject was deep--well, sort of deep. The music didn’t hurt. The audience seemed happy.

Only one critical churl didn’t care. Maybe he’s too old, or just too tired. Maybe he has different airplanes on his roof.

Maybe there are fiddlers on his roof. . . .