Working 'with Robert Wilson

INAAITA DI NISCEMI
 

I first met Robert Wilson during a snowstorm in February 1976.
Friends had told me that Wilson would be joining us at the ballet
and since Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, my cousin and the Artistic
Director of Rome's Teatro dell'Opera, had long ago alerted me to the
faa that "the only real genius now working in the American theatre
is a madman from Texas." I expected a long-haired eccentric to
emerge from the storm. Wilson's dress and demeanor could not have
been more disconcertingly conservative.

Jerome Robbin's "dances at a gathering" was on the program that
night and at the ballet's conclusion, when "the man in brown" with
his back to audience bent and touched the earth, Wilson looked at
me over his glasses and said ' 'someday I' m going to make a large work
around that gesture."

1976 was the year of the Robert Wilson-Philip Glass collaborative
effort Einstein on the Beach and, having attended the Westbeth run
through in May, I found myself a member of the benefit committee
which helped sell out the house when Einstein was presented in the
Metropolitan Opera house in November.

In 1977, Robert Wilson asked me if I would be interested in
attending the rehearsals of his next work, / Was Sitting on My Patio
This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. Fascinated by the
play's oblique approach to the American vernacular, I went every
day, as did Edwin Denby, the great dance critic. By the end of 1977,1
was sufficiendy friendly with Wilson to be invited to a dinner given
in his honor. Here he pulled a newspaper photograph out of his
pocket and asked me "What do you know about this?" It was a tele-
photo taken illegally of Rudolph Hess in Spandau prison on his
eighty-second birthday in May 1976. At the time of the picture's
publication, I had been so struck by the desolate blankness of the old
 

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