ABSTRACT
This chapter explores fundamental principles of auteurism in Robert Wilson’s and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, while documenting the director’s engaging study of human frailty and potential for greatness as a multisensory journey that involves the spectator in an exploration and appreciation of both life and art. The auteur perspective is amply manifest in Wilson’s manipulation of theater space and time – not to mention in the processing of the monumental musical score – so much so that the mise-en-scène, further to generating an experience of “total theatre,” significantly bears the privileges of a stage écriture, sealing off the identity of the performance as the unique product and property of the director. The opera raises questions of theater textuality and authorship, asking us to reflect on how possible (or indeed, impossible) it is to extricate the creator of the piece from the performance as a text that can be taken up by another artist to be staged in a different cultural, ideological, or aesthetic context.
