Abstract
''I like Shakespeare's language,'' Mr. [Robert Wilson] said recently during a workshop he had set up for the play. He likes to divide his rehearsal process into two or three workshop periods with long stretches of time - two to six months - in between. ''It's like peeling an onion,'' he said. The early workshops enable him to explore a play with the actors; the later rehearsals become much more precise. The breathing spell, he believes, allows a play to seep into the actors' bones. ''A complex work needs time to grow inside,'' he said, and his parting words after a ''Lear'' workshop in January were, ''Go home and dream about Shakespeare.'' It was hard for him, however, to find his Lear. He said he had searched for years for an actor ''in any country'' who had the authority to command the part. Then Mr. Wilson met Marianne Hoppe, the 80-year-old who is considered one of Europe's most eminent stage and screen actors. ''I knew I had found my Lear. She has Lear's face. She has Lear's voice.'' Miss Hoppe began her career at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in the 1920's. ''Those were golden days in Berlin,'' the actress said in her deep voice, ''before the Nazis rode to power. Marlene Dietrich was there. Emil Jannings was there, and Reinhardt. He gave me my first break, and over the years I played the great classic roles for women - Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Shakespeare. I was Mary Tyrone in the German premiere of Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' and Blanche DuBois in the premiere of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' Mr. Wilson has broken ''Lear'' into 15 segments plus a prologue based on a poem by William Carlos Williams, ''The Last Words of My English Grandmother.'' Fragments of the Williams poem, which deals with the deterioration and death of the poet's grandmother, will bisect the play intermittently as a modern subtext. Early in the first ''Lear'' workshop, the director knelt on the floor and ceremoniously unrolled a giant scroll. He gathered the actors around. On the 4-by-24-foot sheet he had drawn a stage picture for each section of the play - what he calls a story board. ''Architectural structure is crucial in my work,'' he said. If we don't know where we're going, we can't get there. So this is where we're going, and we'll figure out together how to get there. I have no sense of direction until I have a sense of the stage space. You don't need a lot of scenery for 'Lear.' All you need is an empty stage.''