Friday, April 17, 1998
‘Monsters’ enraptures audience
THEATER/OPERA: Haunting show masterfully mixes 3-D images,
poetic music
By Vanessa VanderZanden
Daily Bruin Staff
A little boy gravitates step, by step, by step toward a
rectangular canvass tent. The background screen morphs from light
pink to white to grey. A giant white mass of unidentified material
slides preternaturally from one end of the stage slowly, slowly,
slowly to the other.
And yet, as the spectacle trudges on, on-lookers cannot remove
their eyes from it.
The stage team of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson have done it
once again. That is, they have managed to completely redefine the
limits of theater. Their "Digital Opera in Three Dimensions" titled
"Monsters of Grace 1.0," running through April 26 at the newly
renovated Royce Hall, enters realms that the UCLA Center for
Performing Arts has never yet explored.
The 68-minute spellbinder meshes Glass’ entrancing, jarring,
serene and enthralling orchestration with the simple, truthful
lyrics of the 13th-century Turkish mystic poet, Jalaluddin Rumi.
Wilson sets the music against a background which trades off between
live performances of starkly clad figures and enwarping 3-D screen
projections.
The effect is like a sleepwalk in the fourth dimension.
From the first appearance of digitally animated stereoscopy,
Glass’ and Wilson’s frighteningly subversive talent creeps to the
surface. On screen, a harmless row of houses at night gradually
becomes obscured by the changing perspective found behind a grove
of trees. While placated by this calming scene, a lullaby-voiced
singer hauntingly repeats, "Don’t Go Back to Sleep, Don’t Go Back
to Sleep."
Likewise, much of Glass’ Eastern-sounding material swells
forward with an underlying suspenseful tension. This gripping
quality suggests that something might occur in the freeze-frame
style visual action occurring onstage, even if it only manifests in
any of the minute movements displayed. Somehow, this
heartbreakingly tragic, indescribably poetic music offers a
backbone to the work and provides drama to an otherwise painfully
uneventful piece.
The cryptic avant-garde stage direction, which at one point has
a small boy sitting in a chair as a woman sweeps across the stage
wearing a flowing white dress which stays connected at one end to
the curtain from which she emerges, suddenly takes on meaning. Even
if that meaning is only that, well, a woman sweeps across the stage
wearing a flowing white dress which stays connected at one end to
the curtain from which she emerges as a small boy sits in a
chair.
This intermeshing of otherwise unrelated media and concepts
offers a post-modern dream world. The point seems not necessarily
to "comment" on anything but rather to provide an intriguing sense
of the here and now, a here and now which Wilson and Glass
painstakingly create with the highest attention paid to detail.
Even the selection of prime Rumi lines as a libretto reflects
the work’s concern for an accessible reality. For instance, while
plainly clothed characters stand in solitary positions on the
stage, a singer releases Rumi’s simplistic response to how Jesus
performed one of his many miracles. He asks for a kiss on the lips,
"Like This."
Not one person left to take a bathroom break during the strange
and hypnotizing work. And the only noise heard throughout the
intermissionless event was that of audience members adjusting of
their 3-D glasses. People even seemed afraid to clap from scene to
scene, for fear they would upset the soothing, molassesy course of
the unique event, missing something in the process.
So sweet, so honest, so enthralling. For the full 68 minutes, no
one could think of going "Back to Sleep." They couldn’t even
blink.