this one has
been being very american
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Wilson (direction, set and
light design), Philip Glass (music and lyrics), Lucinda Childs (choreography),
Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs (spoken texts) Einstein on the Beach / 1976 / The
performance I saw was at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the LA Opera
performance, the matinee of Sunday, October 13, 2013
With great anticipation I attended
the now legendary Einstein on the Beach on
Sunday, a work which I had missed for almost four decades, a performance likely
to be its last American showing overseen by its original creators, Philip
Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs. I was willing, I was wanting to be
wowed!
Unfortunately, I was not. When asked by my friend Marjorie Perloff about
my reactions, I could only comment that they were very contradictory, some
positive, others not so; but generally, unlike so many of my acquaintances who
had seen it, I was simply not in awe!
My feelings about this are not based, as anyone who has read my essays
would perceive, on the work’s impenetrability, on my not being able to—as
critic Tim Page had described it in his lecture before the performance—find my
own “gate” into the work. Indeed, the work seemed quite wide open to me. Its
structure, vaguely suggested by writer Christopher Knowles around the motifs of
“trials, jails, communication, and transportation,” almost all in some way
loosely relating to elements of Einstein’s thinking and life. In the broadest
sense, we might comprehend Einstein on
the Beach as a vague, disconnected skein of events occurring during what we
might call “The Age of Einstein,” from the earliest days of Einstein’s theories
to the time of his death in 1955—although the work extends also beyond that
period to Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and joining of The Symbionese Liberation
Army in 1974. While the events of this “opera” are not presented historically,
there is a sort of chronological rhythm, beginning with the simple idea (in the
first of the remarkable Knee Plays) of counting, as the figures of the chorus
and dancers move forward and backwards in rhythmic motions and spoken patterns,
with the first long scene moving on to the inevitable train, recalling
Einstein’s experience in a still train that, when passed by a moving train,
gave the impression that he too was moving—ideas which led to his Theory of
Relativity. Throughout the work also we are introduced to images of the sea, a
place beloved by the scientist, and we are presented in several beautiful
instances with Einstein’s own love of playing the violin, as Jennifer Koh, her
head topped in an Einstein-like hairdo, stunningly executes some of the work’s
most inspiring passages of music.


In between are various scenes about love, failed and fulfilled, and an
almost random selection of social and political events of the era, from racism,
women’s liberation, political revolution, to gay liberation (suggested by
Child’s “Dance 2”), and provocative and disturbing international events such as
the rocket sequence and, almost as an aftermath, the atomic bomb—also related,
of course, to Einstein’s theories. Some of these, in particular the “Night
Train” sequence, the “Building” sequence, the “First Dance,” and the final Knee
Play, are quite lyrical and intimate. Others, such as the first and second
“Trials” are, at least to me—my companion Howard and others of my friends were not
so taken with the language of either—filled with remarkably comic poetry. The
first “Trial’s” “Mr. Bojangles” harangue, written by Christopher Knowles, is
almost Steinian in its delicious illogic and repetitions argued by the court
lawyer (Patrick John O’Neill):
JUDGES
This court of common pleas is now in session.
LAWYER : MR BOJANGLES
If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge
Mr Bojangles
If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge
chuck the hills
If you know it was a violin to be answer the
telephone and if
any one asks you please it was trees it it it is
like that
Mr Bojangles, Mr Bojangles, I reach you
So this is about the things on the table so this one
could he counting up.
The scarf of where in Black and White
Mr Bojangles If you see any of those baggy pants
chuck the hills
it was huge If you know it was a violin to be answer
the
telephone and if anyone asks you please it was trees
it it it is like that.
Mr Bojangles Mr Bojangles Mr Bojangles I reach you
The scarf of where in Black and White
This about the things on the table.
This one could be counting up.
This one has been being very American.
The scarf of where in Black and White.
If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge
chuck the hills
If you know it was a violin to be answer the
telephone and if
any one asks you please it was trees it it it it it
it it it it it
is like that
………………
This about the gun gun gun gun gun...

In this remarkable piece American
stereotypes are called up from the roles played by Black dancer Bill Robinson
to the Bob Dylan composition referring to a white street dancer in baggy pants,
while simultaneously suggesting the American cultural history of the minstrel
shows, all resulting in the kind of sophistic logic of sentences such as “if
you knew it was the violin to be….answer the telephone” and the wonderful
closing “if any one asks you please…it was trees,” all ending in the stutter of
“it it it it it it it it it,” repeated in the final result of this aspect of
the American experience (“This one has
been being very American”), in the violence expressed in “gun gun gun gun gun.”
Similarly, in the second Trial—also memorable simply because it is
repeated almost 40 times—Lucinda Child’s Patty Hearst speech, performed from a
large bed, is equally poetic in its effects, calling up, as it does, Allen
Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” and expressing the wacky consumerism
of a woman in “a prematurely air-conditioned super market” attracted to bathing
caps despite the fact that she has been avoiding the beach:

I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market
and there were all these aisles
and there were all these bathing caps that you could buy
which had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them
they were red and yellow and blue
I wasn't tempted to buy one
but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding
the beach.
Other texts are first embedded in
nonsense phrases that gradually become rhythmic units that slowly turn into
recognizable phrases and ultimately sentences:
Would would it. Would it get. Would it get some. Would it get some wind.
Would it get some wind for. Would it get some wind for the. Would it get
some wind for the sailboat?
Or the earlier, What does he want? series of repetitions.
Visually things move slowly in time and space back and forth, from
horizontality to vertical positions. All is relative. But also all these create
narrative links, often repeated in the intermittent Knee Plays.
Underneath, or perhaps one should say, on top of these scenes, is the
continuously pulsing beauty of Glass’ music, like the texts, shifting in their
endless repetition from simple pulses to widening layers of melody.
So what is my problem, you might ask? Haven’t I just described an
incredible piece of art? Yes and no. For the problem is that this work, which
so purposefully resists all narrative structures, is, as I argue, extremely
narrative. Admittedly, I see narrative (as opposed to story) in practically
everything, and have long been convinced that we inherently think in narrative
patterns (at least I do). But the work’s very resistance to those narrative
threads inevitably creates a search for deeper links between the “opera’s”
parts, which is insistently and sometimes meaninglessly denied. Had the
creators of this piece been willing to simply describe their work as a kind of
Cagean “circus,” we might have all been able to simply sit back and enjoy its
various parts; but by portentously tying it to Einstein, and purposely toying
with ideas that are vaguely Einsteinian, they merely frustrate all efforts to
penetrate, while seemingly demanding that we still attempt to make a whole of
the pieces.

Why choose these certain elements of American cultural history in the
Age of Einstein, and not others? Was it merely that the creators had already
worn us and themselves out in the 4 ½ hours they had arbitrarily determined?
(it was, originally, even longer). I am not asking for a fluid narrative rise
and fall of action, nor even a kind of coherent and binding structure, but, I’m
afraid, the creators seem to be, and that transforms the work from being an
enjoyable series of musical, visual, theatrical, and terpsichorean episodes
into an often frustrating endurance test.
Finally, the work does not today seem as radical as its creators and
faithful admirers describe it to be. Throughout, a great deal of the work is
simply sentimental in both its images and language: a half moon gradually turns
into a full moon as the silent lovers on a slowly moving train briefly come
together in a gentle touch. The mellow jazz tenor saxophone solo of Andrew
Sterman justifiably haunts all the urban street walkers—as well as the
audience. Although the judge of the first Trial (the excellent Charles
Williams) brilliantly imitates a feminist from Kalamazoo who, tired of bearing
babies, wants all her kisses back, the final scene ends with an oscillation of
a kiss between park bench lovers. All right, I want love and peace as well, as
I’m sure Einstein did. But I think I might never describe the depth of my
feelings, in the clichéd language of a lover, as containing more than the
grains of sand on the seashore or stars in the sky. The work seems to have much
more fun when it simply counts. And in counting it matters more than its
simple-minded solutions proffered by a bus driver in the dark.
Surely, if nothing else, this is not radical thinking, as Tim Page
argued for it beforehand. The theater of language by writers of a decade or two
later, like Mac Wellman (in Terminal Hip and
The Great Magoo, the later also with
music), Len Jenkin, Richard Foreman and Eric Overmyer, for example, are, to my
way of thinking, far more radical. Let us just agree, that in its mix of forms
and thematic arches, Einstein on the
Beach is, in fact, “being very American,” at moments profoundly complex, at
others, entertainingly hollow.
Los Angeles, October 16, 2013
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2013).