Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, have shared a tribute to his longtime collaborator, the avant-garde playwright and theater director Robert Wilson, who died July 31 at the age of 83. “Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds,” Waits wrote on social media. “[His] vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night!” Find the full statement below.
In 1989, Waits, Wilson, and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a stage adaptation of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. Waits’ music for the production was collected on his 1993 album The Black Rider. Waits and Wilson reunited in 1992 to stage an opera inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—which Waits alludes to in his message—then again in 2000 for a musical adaptation of Georg Büchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck. In 2010, the two of them were reportedly working on a new theatrical production, though the project never saw the light of day. Throughout his career, Wilson also collaborated with Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Lady Gaga.
On Not Saying Farewell to Our Friend Robert Wilson
Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds… his vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit…
No one could paint like Bob with light… he collaborated with great lighting designers who patiently, arduously, took his elaborately detailed visions and precise instructions into the days that became nights… he found all the things that live between the membrane and the weathervane…
Bob was among the artists who see, feel, hear, and sense the world in a way that most don’t experience it and want that experience to be shared and to connect others also immersed and suspended between the breaths of Life.
Bob set course for the unseen portals of his imagination and gathered brave, adventurous, devoted, gifted, and brilliant artists, and crews and devotees and opened many hearts and eyes. Bob had to be valiant, dictatorial, curious, ever listening, wily, playful, deluded, strategic, flirtatious, fallible, political, and willing to protect and persevere against all doubters, critics, compass navigators, naysayers well intentioned or not.
