TEMPTED.(theatrical producer Robert Wilson)(Brief Article)

On a hot day in early August, under the large tent that provides rehearsal and working spaces at the Watermill Center, in Watermill, Long Island, about forty-five people were waiting for Robert Wilson. As anyone who has worked with Wilson or attended one of his visionary theatre productions knows, for him time is a relative phenomenon. "The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin," an opera performed in the nineteen-seventies, had a running time of just under twelve hours. His 1998 staging of "Lohengrin," at the Metropolitan Opera, made Wagner's seem like a blackout sketch. This group had gathered for an introductory workshop on "The Temptation of St. Anthony," by Gustave Flaubert, one of six new Wilson productions being developed at Watermill this summer, and the dramaturge surprised nearly everyone by arriving when he'd said he would, a few minutes after noon.

Wilson is a big man, six-four and, at sixty years old, a bit fuller in the middle than he used to be, and he was sensibly dressed, in khaki shorts and a navy polo shirt. He sat down at a long table and began by asking everybody to say who they were, where they came from, and what they were doing there. Actors, singers, dancers and choreographers, filmmakers, musicians, costume designers, and his own principal associates complied, naming many countries of origin, on several continents. "Where is Christopher?" Wilson asked at one point. Someone volunteered that Christopher Knowles, a veteran Wilson performer, was "writing a poem," and would be there shortly. Wilson, who speaks in a deliberate, resonant voice, then talked briefly about the St. Anthony project, which is being sponsored by the Aventis Foundation, in Germany, and will be produced by the Ruhr Trienniale festival, near Essen, next June. "We had a study group on it in 1999, in which we discussed the life sciences of the twenty-first century," he said. "Most recently, I've been speaking to Bernice Reagon, about working with her to take the nineteenth-century Flaubert text and make it pertinent to today, through her music."

He nodded to Bernice Johnson Reagon, a serene-looking woman in a yellow-and-black dashiki, who was seated across the table from him, and asked her to say a little about her work. Reagon said that she tried to operate from a core of African-American musical traditions, in a cultural context that acknowledges other traditions. "We want to make it clear that we are not alone, and that we don't want to be alone, and that we don't even need to be in charge," she said. The "we" in question is Sweet Honey in the Rock, the a-cappella group that she formed in 1973 in Washington, D.C., where she lives. Reagon also wanted to say that she was not entirely happy with the story of St. Anthony and his temptations. "The way I read the story," she said, "the man represents an extreme position as being the center. He seems to think that the more pure you can be, the more you deprive yourself of every possible thing that would make you human, then the closer ...