Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, 1973

Premiere am 14. Dezember 1973, Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Regie: Robert Wilson.
Texte: Robert Wilson, Ann Wilson, Cindy Lubar und Christopher Knowles
Musik: Alan Lloyd, Igor Demjen, mit Julie Weber und Michael Galasso
Choreographie: Andy de Groat
Bühnenbild: Fred Kolo and Lester Polakov
Kostüme. by Mary Brecht
Besetzung: Robert Wilson, Sheryl Sutton, Cindy Lubar, Kenneth King, Stefan Brecht, Andy de Groat, Mary Peer, Ann Wilson, Scotty Snyder, Sue Sheehy, Hope Kondrat, Carol Mullins, Jim Neu, et al.

"This all-night performance was a final grand statement of Wilson's work with his original ensemble, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. Incorporating scenes from The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Deafman Glance, and KA MOUNTAIN, Wilson devised a remarkable structure in which the play's first three acts subtly mirrored its last three acts, and its central act (the fourth) became a pivot around which the others revolved. The play interweaves surrealistic takes on Stalin's life with other dream-like renderings of life in the twentieth century, all presented within the elaborate stage artifice of the Victorian age."

Robert Wilson on The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin
"Many people said the work had nothing to do with Stalin, and in a sense you could see it that way. It wasn't the kind of work one would see about Stalin in a history book, but it was a work by an artist. It was a work in which we could see Stalin as a monster sitting in the middle of the Victorian bedroom; we could see him as the priest, as a murderess; we could see him as the mother, the child; we could see him as the Ice Man. We could see him as many characters, or as no one. Or Stalin could be seen as no one -- could only appear as a name in the title. It was thinking of contemporary gods the way Racine or the Greeks wrote about the gods of their time. They were commonly known by man. With Stalin already in the title, the audience came to the theater with some knowledge of who this man was, sharing the story. In a sense, I didn't have to tell a story; one could just associate these pictures with their own ideas of Stalin, and mine. Or one could look at it in a more literal way, the relationship of Stalin to the pictures. The story could simply be in the title" [Kaiser, Paul. Interview with Robert Wilson, December 1995, for Visionary of Theatre CD-ROM).

Beide Zitate nach http://www.robertwilson.com/common/featuredworks/stalin2.html.