Avant-garde playwright and director Robert Wilson, 83, died on July 31. Wilson studied architecture and art, then moved to theater, where one of his first plays was “a ballet for iron-lung patients where the participants moved a fluorescent streamer with their mouths while the janitor danced dressed as Miss America." He founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds where he directed The King of Spain and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. With Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, he created Einstein on the Beach; his other works included the "silent opera" (the best kind of opera!) Deafman Glance, and the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which ran 12 hours long (or perhaps it only seemed like it). His The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin also ran for 12 hours, and KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace was staged on a mountaintop in Iran and lasted seven days. Tom Waits said of Wilson’s works, “Words for Bob are like tacks on the kitchen floor in the dark of night and you're barefoot . . . Bob changes the values and shapes of words. In some sense they take on more meaning; in some cases, less.” Or, as Harpo Marx said of Abie’s Irish Rose, “No worse than a bad cold.”
