Einstein on the Beach - reflections

We're a month out from having traveled to the northern, frozen wastelands of Ann Arbor, MI (though it won't be frozen for long) to see the opening night preview performance of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the first performance of the opera in twenty years, the opening preview night of only the fifth staging of the opera ever.

First off, I will say that it's an amazing piece of work - the music, the performance, the repetition, the experience, everything. The opera has to be one of the most unique, stunning, repetitive, meditative experiences that I've ever been a part of. I don't know that I understand the piece - even a tenth or a hundredth of the piece, but I'm absolutely thrilled that I was there.

The work was, admittedly, long - four and a half hours in length, top to tail, performed without an intermission, meaning that people had to make their own breaks. The Girl took two breaks in the performance, but I never left the theater. It made for a very odd, gorgeous experience with acts and scenes progressing with little connection from one to the other, something that I've certainly never experienced in my theater-going experience.



I keep struggling to use the term 'opera' to describe Einstein as my views of opera have always involved telling a story via song, acting, and dance, and Einstein certainly isn't any sort of storytelling. It is, in fact, the antithesis of story. Each act, each scene (?), each movement seems to exist in total independence of the others, utilizing the same performers but often without any relation to them having been on stage previously. The music is repetitive to a fault, something that I found meditative and gorgeous but something that The Girl found - and know going in that she would find - the music droning and tedious.

To me the repetition of the music allowed me to often slip away from the music, to let my mind drift and focus on the details of the performance. At times there was so much action on stage - a dozen performers each moving and singing, dancing or standing still but shifting their head or their hands or even one finger - that I found the visuals hard to follow. I had to choose to follow one performer for a time and then to shift my attention elsewhere, only to find myself shocked at the changes that had taken place before I could look back.

At other times, the repetition took place around a nearly empty stage with two, one, or - in one notable scene shown at the top of this post - no one on stage for twenty (?) minutes in which a single, brilliant, huge bar of light shifted from horizontal to vertical and then rose off the stage at a glacial pace. Neither - the action-filled stage or the person-less stage was any less fascinating. Both were utterly mesmerizing.

The above scene, for example (photo from the 1992 production), consisted of...

• the man in red (front, right) writing on an invisible chalkboard with one repeated motion for twenty minutes without any other motion
• the boy on the balcony holding and rotating a glowing cube for minutes at a time breaking his motion up only by pulling paper airplanes from his satchel and throwing them onto the stage
• the two-dimensional train smoking for the full twenty minutes before finally sliding onto the stage while the engineer smoked his pipe, not speaking or moving otherwise
• one dancer methodically dancing diagonally back and forth from the back right to front left corner, sometimes seeming to move slightly further left with each pass and sometimes seeming to make the exact...same...path with every pass...the pacing of the dancing, the other motion going on the whole time made it almost impossible to discern whether the progression was real or in my mind
• the newspaper-holding dancer working his way across the stage in an labyrinthine but rectilinear pathway full of ninety degree angles
• the shell-holding man on the left walking almost as John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch across the stage

I wanted to watch every person to see what they were doing, to see if they would make some change to their action that would reveal something, but I couldn't watch them all so I found myself having to alternately split my attention among them all and focus on one to the exclusion of the others knowing that it was the only way I could  have any hope of being anything other than surprised by the changes I had missed.

Though every scene was both stunning and tedious, three scenes in particularly stood out to me:

• The person-less stage with the light making progress with the music became an entirely meditative moment, knowing that the motion was so slow that I could turn away but knowing that there was nothing to which I could turn my attention. It was gorgeous.
• One scene in particular had an extended saxophone solo played while the entire cast - twenty-plus performers - came onto the stage to stand in front of a scrim on which was painted a building (shown to the right in the 1992 production) with a man with chalk. The saxophone was so different from the rest of the music, almost something you would hear in a 1980's movie soundtrack over a long pair of legs - only if those legs were on screen for half an hour (maybe, I lost track of time repeatedly through the night) while every performer walked on stage one at a time, turning to look at the chalk-holding man before another performer entered.
• The finale was a huge set piece with the whole orchestra and all the performers on a three-story set, each standing in front of a light design or circles, graphs, and lines while two identically-dressed performers shifted up and down, back and forth across the stage in glass boxes.The scale of the set was stunning after so many minimalist sets, sometimes no more than light on a blank stage with ballet dancers crossing the stage.

There were very few things that I could definitively say reference Einstein, and none of those were ever made obvious or overt.

• The concept of trains appeared numerous times, and I know Einstein initially described the theory of relativity, the concept that each of us moves in reference to our frame as two people on neighboring trains seeing the other begin to move and not knowing which of them was moving. Movement from either without a non-moving frame of reference would be impossible to identify as movement from either.
• At one point the singers stuck out their tongues after furiously 'brushing' their teeth with toothbrushes. Einstein does have a famous photo of him sticking his tongue out.
• The trial scenes took place in front of a backdrop of an eclipse with two pinpoints of light, one on each side of the moon. One of the most famous public proofs of the theory of relativity involved the lensing of a distant star around an eclipse, allowing us to see in action the lensing effects of gravity.
• A scrim dropped in front of the three-story scene depicting an atomic explosion (a mushroom cloud) with scientific explanations abounding. Einstein certainly had much to do with the ideas behind the atomic bomb.

Other than those, I really don't know what much of the piece had to do with Einstein...which is both beautiful and frustrating.

There was a film booth in the theater lobby in which anyone could sit down and give their impressions - before, during, after the performances. We eschewed the booth, even as the opening night performance was held back half an hour due to the nasty, snow-covered roads. I did, however, get to spend some time in the lobby (we got there forty-five minutes before the intended curtain) watching the guy on the right of this video.

I couldn't tell if he was entirely there, somehow mentally off, or just eccentric. The Girl came down in the camp of eccentric.



I was amazed at how many times in the performance I laughed. Because of the constant repetition, even the smallest human moments were beautifully rewarding. When one performer, for example, stalked onto the stage with exaggerated, dramatic steps and turned toward the crowd flashing a huge smile, the entire audience laughed out loud. Such small moments because huge because of the lack of time frame, the disconnection from the passage of time - something that I imagine was referencing Einstein, as well.

There are very few photos - and no videos - from the 2012 performances that I can find online. Here are the few (all of which will make gorgeous desktop backgrounds at school) that I can find thanks to the pomegranate arts who put on this year's shows.

You can get some scenes from the 1984 production below, interspersed with interview clips with Wilson and Glass, themselves. The 2012 production was, from what I can see in all the images and clips on the web, substantively identical to the 1984 (and, I assume, original productions). Einstein - in a surprisingly small part, really - was played by an Asian women instead of a white man, but the sets, the costumes, the staging that you can see in the video are all very much like what we saw in Ann Arbor.



If you want to know more about Einstein, check out this documentary on the opera. You'll get to see footage from the 1984 production. It's uploaded to YouTube in its entirety but broken into four parts totaling nearly an hour long.



Everyone at a musical performance takes in the performance on their own. This work, however, seems even more so as there is no story, no path to take with your fellow theater-goers. To this end, I thoroughly enjoyed the reactions of the people near us.

The Girl was beside an older couple who spent large swaths of the performance dozing.

We had a couple behind us who leaned in as the bar of light tilted and rose and asked each other, "Do you know what this movement is called?"..."How to waste ten minutes."...Ten minutes later they leaned together and amended the previous statement to "twenty minutes"...

Beside me, sitting solo at the end of our row, was a man who knew the music backwards and forward, asking me why people would be leaving at this moment, if they had no idea what was coming next. I didn't admit to him that I didn't have any clue what was coming, that I'd never actually listened to the work in its entirety - or as entire as the three-cd set that I have (and that is apparently four cds).

To quote these people who were at the Saturday performance (I was at Friday's), "I think this is one of Philip Glass's best operas about Einstein."



I would certainly agree with that assessment, and I'm thrilled that I got to see this phenomenal work in its entirety.

...and I owe The Girl big time...