Time-Traveling With Robert Wilson : Theater Director Looks Back at 25 Years of Being at Foreground of Avant-Garde

In the late 1970s and ‘80s, when bigger was better, an ex-Texan named Robert Wilson changed the look of American theater. Conjuring epic, iconoclastic theater pieces and operas, he quickly became one of the leading figures of the international avant-garde.

But, for someone so influential, Wilson has not been seen much in his own country. Estranged from the normal channels of U.S. performing arts presentation, he has worked instead in Europe, becoming one of the key forces on stages there for the last 15 years.

“My work was discovered in Europe, and there was an audience for it there,” says Wilson, speaking by phone from Houston, where he was in rehearsals for his “Hamlet,” which premieres at the Alley Theatre next month.

American audiences just haven’t been as receptive. “My work is formal, not based on psychology,” Wilson says. “(Europeans) are used to seeing something other than naturalistic, psychological theater.”

What is known here of the prolific and multidisciplinary Wilson is incomplete, according to the artist. “Because people haven’t seen a lot of my work here, people think of me as anti-text or (predominantly) visual, which is really not true,” he says. “I’m supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.”

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He plans to correct this misperception tonight. The director will present “Entering the Multi-Dimensional Vision of Robert Wilson: A Space That Is Filled With Time,” an illustrated lecture retrospective of 25 years of his work, at the Wadsworth Theater, co-presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts and UCLA Extension.

It will be Wilson’s first appearance in a decade in a city where only three of his works have ever been staged: “I Was Sitting on My Patio” in 1977, a workshop of “King Lear” in 1985 and “the Knee Plays” in 1986.

In fact, his L.A. past isn’t just spotty, it’s checkered.

Wilson’s 12-hour epic, “the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,” was supposed to have been staged here as part of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. But it was canceled--amid acrimony, when the funding fell apart--at the last moment.

It was a major personal setback for the artist. “It took me a while to recover,” says Wilson of the project, which has never been produced in its entirety and which is still considered his most ambitious ever. “In order to pay for the tremendous debt of ‘the CIVIL warS,’ I had to work in Europe.”

Wilson first broke through with the 1970 theater work “Deafman Glance.” He is best known, however, for the 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach,” with Philip Glass.

Since the mid-1980s, he’s staged numerous unconventional adaptations of works from the standard opera and theater repertory at major houses in Europe.

His recent original projects have included such works as “Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets” (1991), his first of several collaborations with Tom Waits, and “Alice,” a theater piece about Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll. Wilson also recently completed his first film, “The Death of Moliere.”

Lately, he’s also been making more visual art as well. Wilson’s installation “Memory/Loss,” for instance, won the Golden Lion Award at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and he has a number of sculpture and installation projects in the works.

Yet perhaps Wilson’s most significant career shift in recent years has been spending more time stateside.

He founded a center for theater research known as Water Mill in an abandoned Western Union laboratory on Long Island, where he now spends two months of every year, workshopping projects with a cadre of invited artists.

He has also taken on the role of associate artistic director at Houston’s Alley Theatre, where his “Hamlet”--a one-man show that he directs and performs--will open May 24.

It is proving to be a daunting production, even for an artist known for grand-scale endeavors. “This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Wilson says. “The verse is such a nightmare to learn how to breathe, speak and move.”

Yet the difficulty was part of the attraction. “My mother told me if they ask you to jump two feet, jump four,” says Wilson, whose works have often addressed the nature of language and speech. “So I thought I would try to do the impossible: I knew that I had to do ‘Hamlet.’ ”

Wilson has restructured Shakespeare’s play into a monologue told in flashback and learned much in the process. “I will be a better director after having this experience,” he says. “I know what actors have to do.”

At the same time, Wilson is also at work on a number of large-scale productions, including a Bartok opera for the Salzburg Festival in August. He is directing a play in Chinese with a multinational cast, to be staged at the Theater Olympics in Delphi, Greece, in August.

On the home front, Wilson is creating a dance piece for the Martha Graham Company that will premiere in Washington in November. He is also directing and designing the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thompson opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” for the Houston Grand Opera in 1996.

Wilson has no plans to self-produce his work in the United States, though. He has eschewed that practice since 1984. For, while Wilson is no longer so bitter about the “CIVIL warS” debacle, he is still wary of the climate for the arts in America.

Wilson is disturbed by the current attack on government funding of the arts, a predicament that is at odds with the state support in many of the European nations in which he works.

“The government should assume leadership,” Wilson says. “By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we’re going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell. We need to have a cultural policy (instead). There has to be a balance between government and the private sector.

“One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing,” Wilson says. “They are the journal and the diary of our time.”

* “Entering the Multi-Dimensional World of Robert Wilson: A Space That Is Filled With Time,” a lecture by Robert Wilson, Wadsworth Theater, Brentwood, tonight at 8. $20. (310) 825-2101.