Robert Wilson, innovative gay theater director and playwright, has died at 83

Robert Wilson, known as a writer and director of avant-garde theater, has died at age 83.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

Wilson, who was gay, died Thursday at his home in Water Mill, New York, after a short illness, Chris Green, the executor of his estate and president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation, told The New York Times.

Wilson “shattered theatrical norms with stunning stagings of his own imaginative works as well as innovative collaborations with a diverse roster of artists, from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga,” the Times notes.

He was born in Waco, Texas, in 1941. He studied dance with a local teacher, Byrd Hoffman, who helped him overcome a stammer. He later honored Hoffman by naming some of his projects after her, “including his first New York ensemble, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which underwrites various projects of his,” the Times reports.

After coming out to his father, Wilson left Texas for New York City, where he initially studied architecture. “The move was so overwhelming that Wilson retreated to Waco, attempted suicide, and was briefly institutionalized,” David Ehrenstein wrote in The Advocate in 2007. “A sympathetic psychiatrist helped Wilson see that being gay didn't worry him as much as his father's feelings about it. The young man moved back to New York City, and this time he found his way.”

He soon was staging “mind-bending works,” Ehrenstein wrote, such as 1971’s Deafman Glance, which the reporter described as “a dream spectacle involving an Egyptian pyramid, a rain forest filled with waltzing ‘mammy’ dolls, and giant bunny rabbits who danced to ‘We Belong to a Mutual Admiration Society.’”

Deafman Glance was inspired by Raymond Andrews, a young deaf-mute Black man Wilson adopted in 1968, after intervening when Andrews was being beaten by police. “One morning Raymond made a drawing of a frog sitting at the head of a table drinking martinis, and a man with one eye,” Wilson told Ehrenstein. “Then he did a larger portrait of this man with one eye, and one of a woman with a bird on top of her head. She was sitting at the table with a plate of bones. And that was all in Deafman Glance. God knows where that came from.” Andrews was onstage in the show, sitting on a tree branch.

Wilson also was influenced by another young man, Christopher Knowles, who was autistic and being threatened with institutionalization. They collaborated on several projects in the early 1970s. “Together they coauthored — and Knowles starred in — A Letter to Queen Victoria and several dialogues, which Knowles and Wilson performed together as a kind of avant-garde vaudeville act,” Ehrenstein reported.

"He's unmatched in his ability to reorganize theatrical space with light, color, and startlingly surreal images," Ehrenstein added. "And then there's the almost glacial pace of his productions, which holds spectators in a quasi-hypnotic state akin to waking dreams."

Other Wilson works include 1976’s Einstein on the Beach, an opera he wrote with composer Philip Glass. “What it means exactly is hard to put in words,” Times critic John Rockwell wrote upon its premiere. “Mr. Wilson calmly accepts most interpretations people care to make. The phrase ‘on the beach’ may have some reference to the post‐apocalyptic novel of that name. The overall theme of the play might be said to be a consideration of the same moral and cosmic issues that concerned Einstein himself in his later years, principally the role of science in the modern world and the relation of science to religion.” It has been revived frequently, and Ehrenstein called it Wilson’s masterpiece.

In the 1980s, Wilson and Glass collaborated on The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which was to be the fifth act of a planned 12-hour opera. The full opera was never produced due to lack of funding. The men wrote two other operas together, White Raven and Monsters of Grace, both produced in 1998.

Wilson also directed plays by William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, and others, and adaptations of works by Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, and more. “In some of his adaptations, Mr. Wilson transformed the original work enough to take ownership,” the Times obituary notes.

He worked with a broad range of collaborators, including Tom Waits, Lou Reed, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He did “Video Portraits” of several celebrities, such as Gaga, Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming, and Alan Cumming.

Wilson’s survivors include Andrews; a sister, Suzanne; and a niece, Lori Lambert, the Times reports. In the documentary film Absolute Wilson, he said, “There hasn’t been a great romance in my life.” Ehrenstein observed, “Wilson’s most passionate love objects have not been men but art and fame.”

Wilson described his approach to art to Texas Monthly in 2020. “It’s another world I create; it’s not a world that you see wherever you are, if you’re in your office or if you’re on the streets or at home,” he said. “This is a different world. It’s a world that’s created for a stage.”

Theater, he continued, is “a forum where people come together and can share something together for a brief period of time. Art has the possibility of uniting us. And the reason that we make theater — the reason we call it a play — is we’re playing. We’re having fun. And if you don’t have fun playing, then don’t do it.”