In unfolding and articulating Quartet ’s heated-up Baroque story, Wilson not only presented more characterization and narrative than usual but also injected a fair amount of humor into the production. In one of the work’s eight vignettelike scenes, the Marquise switched to a Texas accent while chewing gum and wielding a handgun; at other moments, men rubbed their crotches, a noose dropped from the flies to “hang” Valmont upside down by one leg, and the innocent “niece” waxed lascivious by writhing onstage and turning a coatsleeve into a phallic puppet. This humor, along with the visual puns and almost slapstick pranks, set off Quartet ’s generally dense, funereal atmosphere, just as in more traditional drama. That director/lighting-and-set-designer Wilson has so expanded his singular vocabulary made this production’s chamber-size scale (two hours in length, a five-person cast) seem like an epic adventure, albeit one in which the action was persuasively conceptual. Like the amusing yet deadly games of amorous intrigue sketched out in its original source, Quartet was a deceptively sly, moving meditation on mortality.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, Wilson moved upstate, where she taught at Dutchess Community College while continuing to make work and to explore forms both new and ancient. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Kunstmuseum Luzerne.
In Wilson’s version, Orlando’s transformation—suspended, stylized, deliberately ambiguous—is entrusted to a single, overtly illustrative element: the minimal costumes designed by Susanne Raschig. In the black 17th-century page’s costume worn in the first scene or the modular, three-layered costume in the last, Orlando/Lady Orlando, in the end wrapped only in an essential earth-colored sheath, will take up, both in the syntax of movements and in the textual quotation, what evidently is for Wilson the central theme of Woolf’s work. Both figures recline, Orlando closed off in the attic, Lady O. against the bare earth, losing themselves in daydreams and reveries: to be other than what they are, to return to being what they were, to be that which they are not yet and perhaps never will be. “I was alone,” says Orlando. “But I am alone,” Lady Orlando seems to respond. He is “in love with death” and with “the feeling of being forever and ever and ever alone”; she says of herself, “the cold breeze of the present brushes my face with its little breath of fear.” In spite of the distance of four centuries of history and of changed sexual identity, they are united in their existential solitude, perhaps the only human experience for which the passage of time provides no consolation.
At the culmination of Einstein is a scene that in its studied choreography, accompanied by the explosion of Glass’ music, recalls the abstract geometries of Busby Berkeley, if not the luxuriant chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies. The three sections of the extremely long opening scene of another work, Death Destruction and Detroit , 1979 (Berlin), make up an almost direct quotation of Busby Berkeley. In the second part, a troop of couples in black evening dress dance in the black space, their white profiles accentuated, while diagonal shafts of light are cast from a series of doors twinkling in the background. These are the same doors from which a quintet of identical waiters parade forth to serve a meal before the dancing couples change into a row of isolated, immobile figures. One person, a lone old man, continues among and around them, following the steps of his endless dance, drawing it out for over an hour, suspended between nostalgia for a lost waltz and the endless spinning that has become a hallmark of Wilson’s early fantasies.
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