Originally composed by Philip Glass, directed by Robert Wilson and choreographed by Lucinda Childs, “Einstein on the Beach” premiered in 1976 at the Théâtre Municipal in Avignon, France. A filmed version of the play from 2014, staged at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, is analyzed in this report. The play is intended to be abstract, without plot or narrative, to create a poetic vision of the Einstein figure and his subsequent impact on society. Since its premiere in 1976, the work has attained legendary status amongst contemporary operatic work, with suggestions its innovative approach will change opera, although little evidence of it’s impact on operatic performances have since been seen (Broadhurst 34, Lesnie, Swed).
The play seems to work on two levels: as a deeper, theoretical comment on Einstein, his theories and role in future impacts of his work, but also as an evolving (more mainstream accessible) comment, questioning whether the application of Einstein’s discoveries in-fact manifested in the betterment of our daily lives. The play draws on notions of time and human productivity from prior eras (Industrial Revolution, slavery, etc), before casting a light forward into the future, mocking the office environments of big corporations in parallel with the court system, loosely drawing cause-and-effect implications to gun violence, the prison crisis, while juxtaposing progressive achievements of space travel with the invention of the atom bomb. In the article, “Einstein on the Beach: A study in temporality,” Broadhurst describes the play’s layered meanings as hermetic, similarly indecipherable to code, how the work is “embedded in its own texture that has its own morphology” (37). At the same time, there is a clarity in message implicating big systemic organizational structures (ie. corporations) on their manner of extracting value from human productivity, uses of people’s time and conformity constraints imposed.
The play is structured in four acts with interstitial (“knee”) plays set in-between acts and also bookending the play. Each interstitial play shows two stenographers sitting on chairs with desks in front (and in later scenes, writhing on tables as if tossing in their sleep), spotlit in a lit square to stage left, while the remainder of the stage is dark, save for a lit chair (front stage right), later occupied by an Einstein figure playing a violin. The choir enters and stands in various configurations in the orchestra area across these interstitial/knee plays. The stenographers and choir members wear ear pieces, identical loose grey pants, black suspenders, similar white shirts and lace-up, high-top sneakers — denoting a uniformed employee status, elucidating the rigid conformity expected from these employee figures, which in-turn denotes a mirroring of mechanization of the systems they work within. The play begins with the stenographers exchanging words and numbers with little meaning or correlation, over time elongating to partial sentences or larger numbers, as the stenographers begin miming typewriting actions as if taking dictation. This connotes the limited role the employees play, managing small pieces of data undecipherable within the bigger picture from the pieces they are given, despite being allowed to grow in knowledge over time to complete full sentences.
For me, the Einstein-clad figure playing a violin, setting the rhythm and pacing for workers and performers alike throughout the later scenes, draws on a well-known trope from the Industrial Revolution, an aspiration remaining in multinational companies today— how industrialists drew inspiration from symphony orchestras as a model for efficiency to emulate in their factories, in their pursuit of profitability. Arguably, the defining feature of the orchestra was the range of string instruments. Einstein, in this sense, is a metaphor for leaders in big organizations commanding legions of employees in intentionally stratified structures to ensure order and discipline is maintained, while they themselves set the tone, pace of the organization’s work culture, enabling them to sit on a beach— an elusive location for most employees. Several times throughout the play, a performer is distracted by a conch shell they find and put to their ear, to hear the ocean. The beach is also a subject a performer repetitively says she has been avoiding while frequenting a prematurely air-conditioned supermarket, as she lies in bed (set between the office, the court and the jail onstage), before changing into dark clothes, pulling out a machine gun and pointing it at the audience (a figure meant to evoke Patty Hearst) (Broadhurst 37, Swed). This same performer is one of the stenographers, whose enunciation and personalized intonation in the opening knee play, seeds the expectation her character may later become unhinged. At the same time (in the initial knee play), the choir repetitively sings a number scale in the foreground, miming driving actions, which connects to the final act of the play (connoting coming full circle). Later, the same stenographer who pulled a machine gun is shown in jail, where she sits in an elevated chair on an empty stage, rhyming off dialogue using mixed metaphors, borrowing known phrases, mentions of 70s celebrities (who I am too young to understand the significance of), increasingly melded within a talk radio personification. The scene implies, why she ended up in jail is open to interpretation rather than facts, where performativity seems to play a role.
In Act I Scene 2, employees line up in rows, performing their work, pencils behind their ears, scratching their heads in unison, resisting distraction or temptation in the presence of mock presiding judges and a spotlit, stern supervisor, wearing heavier makeup than the rest (hair and makeup evoke a clown), sporadically, angrily yelling “no,” out of rhythm with Einstein’s violin. My interpretation is this scene is intended to mock the hierarchy that keeps everyone in line, holding a mirror up to the powers that be. In the same scene, the second stenographer, now wearing a double-vested vest and same matching pants, makes a speech to the employees as a more senior administrator. The speech uses intertextuality, subverting the lyrics of the song, Mr. Bojangles, to simultaneously relate to and suppress workers — the repetitive dialogue, “if you see those baggy pants, chuck the hills, it was huge” and “it could be trees,” can be interpreted as alluding to slave lynchings and big events (not so veiled threats), to varying degrees of worker dispensability— ending with “this could be about the things on the table, this could be about the gun, gun, gun…” denoting punishment, yet also connoting worker reprisal. The senior administrator in-between sections of her speech mimes writing on a clipboard in a low-key manner, denoting worker activities being monitored and documented (00:56:30-01:25:30). This contrasts later acts where dancers move in and out of synchronicity, denoting different ways human bodies move and are motivated to perform, how pressures to conform and threats of punishment are unlikely to be the preferred methods of extracting productivity from people.
Work Cited
Broadhurst, Susan. “Einstein on the Beach: A Study in Temporality.” Performance Research, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2012, pp. 34–40.
Lesnie, Melissa. “Einstein on the Beach: ‘People Thought This Was Going to Change the World.’” The Guardian, 31 July 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/jul/31/einstein-beach-philip-glass-opera.
Swed, Mark. “How Philip Glass and ‘Einstein on the Beach’ Changed Opera.” The Los Angeles Times, 18 Nov. 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-11-18/philip-glass-einstein-on-the-beach-opera.
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