The Black Rider


This is a story shaped for the stage by Robert Wilson, originally of Waco, Texas, who as it turns out is an artist who creates with graphics, motion, character masks and costumes, mime and other hypnotic uses of movement driven by trance states, spacing ... he doesn't break a play down into segments, his job being creating sets. He is the atmosphere, and the actors and script and music are paint for his canvass. He has the touch.


Tonight, theater was moving away from what I have been used to, which is emotion driven by dialogue. This play skipped ordinary emotion, because it was a reflection of the mind of Burroughs, engaged with an archetypal tale from Germany that mirrored his own tale from Mexico City, where he killed his wife trying to shoot a shot glass off her head.

Here is the mind of Burroughs:

"White bears graze in lush green meadows. A shrieking black boy dances around in civilian bones ... emerald whirlwinds. 'It's always her toes to be left alone.'

"These magical visions are totally devoid of ordinary human emotion and experience. There is no friendship, love, hostility, fear or hate. There are no rules, no series of steps by which one can be in a position to see. Consequently, such visions are the enemy of any dogmatic system. Any dogma must postulate the way, certain steps that will lead to the salvation which the dogma promises."

Ordinary emotions aren't there. There are emotions, but they are stylized art. They are silent screams, a body frozen in fear ... there are emotions flowing into intellectual forms, dance, movement ... everything is connected to archetypes, so that it is in a way returning to the classical function of theater, which is to de-potentiate certain destructive patterns in the psyche by acting them out ritually. Because the psyche reads the pattern, it will accept the playing out, for example, of a mother murdering her children, if it is done convincingly. The play at times not only brings to consciousness what nobody wants to know, but satisfies the urge to act it out unconsciously.

The story on which the Black Rider hangs is old, simple and German, which begs for a punch line but I'm ignoring it.

Lilly, with whom I saw the play, said, "When a German father doesn't want his daughter to marry somebody in a play, you brace yourself for something terrible to happen if she does. In Germany you don't go against the wishes of your parents without consequences."

That was the heart of the play. The girl wanted to marry a clerk and her father insisted that she marry a huntsman. The clerk couldn't hit the broad side of a barn without intervention from supernatural forces, in the form of a satanic dark mistress (Marianne Faithfull), who provides magic bullets.

But he needs one more bullet for a shooting contest on his wedding day, and this bullet has a mind of its own and ... here Burroughs found that his personal tragedy was not personal. There is an archetypal form for the bullet which goes astray, has a mind of its own, kills the bride, and sends the man to hell, to insanity ...

I recall a lecture by Marion Woodman in which she said that personal suffering is unbearable, but once it has been recognized as archetypal suffering, as the human condition, it becomes bearable.

He had to write his way out. He writes: "the more of them magics you use, the more bad days you have without them. So it comes down finally to all your days being bad without the bullets. It's magics or nothing."

The Black Rider was developed from a version of the folk tale by Thomas de Quincey. It was titled "The Fatal Marksman," and published in "Tales and Romances of Northern Nations" in 1823.

It will disappoint anyone who expects everyday people engaging each other with ordinary emotion. There isn't any ordinary emotion because there isn't any ordinary behavior. Every move is in a tempo, with a trajectory and a velocity. The visual impact of every scene is in the beauty of simplicity. Wilson creates stunning installations that can be set up behind a curtain during a three minute song.

The male lead is Matt McGrath.

I didn't know McGrath, but he showed up at a reading at Cafe du Nord Sunday night, along with Peter Coyote and a few other people who read from Burroughs. McGrath came on last and did one song. He does an inspired interpretation of Wait's songs. Waits and Wilson worked together in 1993, when Waits scored the play and the Black Rider album was released.

Last but not least, the Magic Bullets in the orchestra pit provided music as impressive as the visuals they were energizing.

Wilson has staged productions from Paris to Tokyo to Berlin -- around the world -- but this is his first one in San Francisco.

Black Rider is playing in San Francisco through October 10.

Posted: Wed - September 22, 2004 at 02:09 AM