{"id":217276,"date":"2026-05-02T00:03:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/217276\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T00:03:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:03:13","slug":"moby-dick-review-robert-wilsons-last-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/217276\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Moby Dick\u2019 Review: Robert Wilson\u2019s Last Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a few months before the great American avant-garde director Robert Wilson died<\/a> \u2014 the last day of July 2025 \u2014 Wilson\u2019s production of \u201cMary Said What She Said\u201d came to N.Y.U. Skirball. Isabelle Huppert declaimed in French as the doomed Mary Stuart, a high Elizabethan collar framing a face painted chalk-white. She moved unnaturally yet smoothly, like a marionette suspended a centimeter above the floor, gliding through one of Wilson\u2019s cold, gray limbos. \u201cMary Said What She Said<\/a>\u201d seemed to take as long as any Wilson show did \u2014 an eternity that became one vivid instant when it was compressed by the next day\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

When Wilson died, I was tormented by the thought that we would never see anything he made again. But Wilson worked largely overseas, collaborating with European repertory companies that maintain shows for decades and, importantly, tour. So \u201cMoby Dick,\u201d which he directed and designed in 2024 for the D\u00fcsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, has landed, for just a precious few days, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Aspects of it have attached themselves to my understanding of Herman Melville\u2019s classic forever. It\u2019s extraordinary, a tight-beam message from outer space, Wilson\u2019s final fully realized transmission from a life in art.<\/p>\n

On the Wilson scale of esoteric experimentation, this half-German, half-English musical is downright accessible: It\u2019s only 100 minutes long \u2014 his 1976 masterpiece with Philip Glass, \u201cEinstein on the Beach,\u201d lasted over four hours \u2014 and the British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi\u2019s palatable guitar-rock score, with its jaunty doglegs into hornpipe and shanty, mostly scoots right along. (Chris Wheeler and Dom Bouffard wrote additional music.)<\/p>\n

The adapter Robert Koall has stripped Melville\u2019s story to its best-known elements. The rootless Ishmael (Raphael Gehrmann, endearingly na\u00efve) yearns toward the sea; he grows fond of his tattooed ship- (and bed-) mate Queequeg (Yaroslav Ros, wearing glam-rock slashes of black paint); their whaling ship, the Pequod, is wrecked by the deranged Captain Ahab (Rosa Enskat) and his pursuit of the white leviathan Moby Dick. It\u2019s no period production. Characters, typically for a Wilson show, look like German expressionist film stars: Faces painted white; hair in pompadours or flame-shaped quiffs; movements sudden and angular; mouths frozen in shocked, rictus O\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Choreographically, each moment extends (or repeats) to the point of hypnosis. Ishmael\u2019s bed, for instance, is a shallow box, divided horizontally so that Queequeg lies in a compartment above him. They\u2019re as rigid as two knives separated in a cutlery tray, while tiny spotlights find and fixate on the places where their hands want to touch. This electric contact clearly absorbed Wilson\u2019s attention more than the book\u2019s violence; the climactic battle with the whale is merely a long darkness, during which the guitars lose their minds in the orchestra pit.<\/p>\n

Koall has added a boy-narrator (the sublime Christopher Nell), who complains \u201cI am not Ishmael\u201d in a superb countertenor as a long-bearded old man tries to tell him the story of \u201cMoby Dick\u201d again. The clown-like boy, in gray shorts and suspenders, his hair upright as a rooster\u2019s comb, suggests the whole, tragic, adult affair is a child\u2019s gleeful joke. \u201cIt is not a good end!\u201d he shrieked, to stop our clapping, demanding a sweeter resolution. (I did regret his steering us into Calvi\u2019s most sentimental song, a cloying ditty about the sailors being \u201ctoo wild to die.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The eerie physics of \u201cMoby Dick\u201d is just like that of \u201cMary Said What She Said,\u201d and, really, so much of what Wilson made. His signature use of a glowing backdrop transforms the theater space into a charged volume, as if we\u2019re inside a Dan Flavin neon box. Objects float within the resulting prism like figures in a surrealist picture: Laws of nature don\u2019t apply. The creepy child could appear flying impossibly high up against the proscenium; or a huge hovering beam \u2014 representing either the albino whale or the finger of a geometric God \u2014 might drift diagonally over Ahab\u2019s head, pointing at his madness.<\/p>\n

This time, Wilson used black-and-white video as sometime scenery, including gorgeous not-quite-stills from sources like the John Huston film of \u201cMoby Dick,\u201d grainy footage of waves and a ship\u2019s rigging, fixed in micro-loops, so the images shudder and pulse. The Romantic sight of Ahab, standing lonely against one such ocean projection, hair blown permanently sideways, might be my favorite of the show\u2019s many beautiful images, although I\u2019ve changed my mind twice since seeing it.<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s vision was of another world. He knew about some alternate place, a pocket universe into which he could move an entire theater, audience and all. You would imagine that he would have created a galaxy of imitators, but somehow no one else has figured out how to do what he does. To do what he did, I should say, although I still refuse to believe it. For this one weekend at BAM, you too can live again in his strange solar system. His star\u2019s gravity still operates there, just as if he were not gone.<\/p>\n

Moby Dick
Through May 3 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org<\/a>. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just a few months before the great American avant-garde director Robert Wilson died \u2014 the last day of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,2905,100,99,85654,9,24,63,85655,905,85499,84264],"class_list":["post-217276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-academy-of-music","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-moby-dick-play","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-robert-1941","tag-theater","tag-theater-off-broadway","tag-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}