As the opera opens, we see two women sitting on the side of the otherwise-bare stage, emotionlessly reciting a series of disconnected numbers and phrases over a faint background ambient drone. For the first part of this, there's also a lot of noise from the audience, who don't quite seem to realize that the opera has started, though eventually they quiet down. This goes on for something like twenty minutes. The question is: can you imagine yourself conceivably liking this? You don't have to necessarily like it as done, but can you imagine a situation where you would? If so, this may be for you. It may not, but it may be. If not...I'd say it's definitely not.
To me, this really drives home how incredibly normal Akhnaten is by comparison. Sure, it's pretty abstract, but it has characters. Specific things happen. There are FREAKIN' ARIAS. Einstein on the Beach has none of those things. Hell, it barely has singing. I mean, it does, but it's mainly repetitive, wordless choruses; there are a few featured singers, but they rarely sing actual words, let alone coherent ideas. There's also a lot of spoken text, but again...very abstruce. It doesn't get much more avant-garde than this. I think you really only call it "opera" because there's no other obvious category to put it in. It's closer to an opera than it is to a musical, but that is the most I'll say for it. And it ain't that close to either.
So...what's it "about," if you can even use that word? Extremely good question. As hard as I try, I find it VERY hard to connect most of this to Einstein in any concrete way (though there is a violinist decked out as the man--apparently he liked to play to help him think). Maybe more generally it's sort of science-y, but even then...I dunno. There are several scenes with trains, one in a courtroom, one in a vaguely futuristic sort of cityscape, a few that just consist of dancers pinging around the stage (like atoms?) to the music, and one that seriously just consists of nothing but a bar of light moving sloooooowly from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. I don't think analytical thought is going to get you very far here. It's sort of different from other operas in that it's more of a group effort: Glass wrote the music, but that is in tandem with Robert Wilson's art design and Lucinda Childs' choreography--point being, it's supposed to be like this. You're not likely to see a more "accessible" performance, so take it for what it is (I'd like to note that this isn't my first encounter with Wilson--the Tom Waits albums The Black Rider, Alice, and Blood Money were all written for plays of his. So that's pretty cool).
I mean, sure I liked it, mainly. The music is incredibly repetitive (in the booklet, Glass objects to his music being thus described, but this strikes me as disingenous--if you don't like it, you shouldn't write the same chord sequences over and over and over, dammit), but, like Akhnaten,frequently hypnotically compelling--though it strikes me that his musical idiom may be somewhat limited in that regard (but then again, The Perfect American seems to demonstrate a wider range). But come on: can't we acknowledge that this gets a little silly sometimes? I think we're in denial if we don't. People are always pulling faces, and how 'bout, the scene that opens the third act? A woman recites the following anecdote:
I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market, and there were all these aisles, and there were all these bathing caps that you could buy which had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them. They were red and yellow and blue. I wasn't tempted to buy one, but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.
Then, she repeats it over and over, dozens and dozens and dozens of times; I didn't count how many or anything, but all told, this goes on for another twenty minutes (did I mention that, as it it weren't inaccessible enough, this is a four-and-a-half-hour piece?). I was watching with my brother, and at a certain point we just looked at each other and laughed, because come on. As you know, I like crazy experimental stuff, and what I want art to do is to give me new experiences. In that sense, Einstein on the Beach totally delivers, and I was extremely glad to see it (though I liked Akhnaten way better), but one has to acknowledge that, in addition to very much not being for everyone, it's just fundamentally a little bit goofy.
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