Whenever Tom Waits and his wife and longtime collaborator Kathleen Brennan pay tribute — or write seemingly anything — it is in the unique tone that has been a hallmark of his and their creative work for more than five decades.
The two paid tribute to their friend Robert Wilson — the experimental theater stage director, playwright, founder and artistic director of The Watermill Center, known for “Einstein on the Beach,” “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud” and more — who died on July 31 at the age of 83. The tribute follows below in full.
On Not Saying Farewell to Our Friend Robert Wilson
Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds…. his vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit……
No one could paint like Bob with light…he collaborated with great lighting designers who patiently, arduously, took his elaborately detailed visions and precise instructions into the days that became nights…. he found all the things that live between the membrane and the weathervane…..
Bob was among the artists who see, feel, hear, and sense the world in a way that most don’t experience it and want that experience to be shared and to connect others also immersed and suspended between the breaths of Life.
Bob set course for the unseen portals of his imagination and gathered brave, adventurous, devoted, gifted, and brilliant artists, and crews and devotees and opened many hearts and eyes. Bob had to be valiant, dictatorial, curious, ever listening, wily, playful, deluded, strategic, flirtatious, fallible, political, and willing to protect and persevere against all doubters, critics, compass navigators, naysayers well intentioned or not.
Bob was an absolute amethyst of an actor…. a space floating astronaut and, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s Queen in ALICE, he regularly dreamed 6 impossible things before breakfast to stage, to paint, to costume, to build, draw, perform, choreograph, film, design…….to light into Life and darkness.
He could make his mind as still as the surface of an evening summer lake then shift into scribbling dance — epileptic, musical, static and trancelike… He trusted and confided in his Muses and created a field of concentration calm as a stoic monolithic rock rising out of rollicking sea.
To get Bob, first, you must believe in the dandelion floatness in the smokey pale light horizon beyond the proscenium…. then smooth out the blanket of time and pour a bottle of ink on the emptiness and call its shape the title of your new show!
Always atune, to a finger, a face, a chin, a leg, a tear, a gesture, a shape, an ear, a branch, a child under the table, the stalk of blooming cactus…..or an unplanned sneeze that turns on the Christmas lights as you the say the word….SCHLEP! His actors ever game and skillful would, upon Bob’s suggestions and their imaginations, would turn their bodies into the letter G or throw up their arms like the wings of a crow and open their mouths in a silent scream…. Bob s-l-o-w-e-d everything down, the actors moved as if underwater….the audience experienced a flower blooming in real time.
Robert Wilson. Bob. Beloved Bob. Biscuits and Gravy Bob, Elegant Bob.
And…with his down-home heart and pure prisms of light mind and a wild and wicked Texas cackle ripping up yellow lighting in a black sky desert…Forever Bob….
Tom and Kathleen
