Ibsen Via Sontag Via Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director, artist, performer, and playwright, was expected to arrive at the Watermill Center, his multidisciplinary artists' colony/theatrical workshop space on Water Mill Towd Road, on Tuesday afternoon.

He was flying in - from where, a hurried assistant didn't say - to fulfill directorial duties for some of the center's summer projects.

Among the plays to be worked on there this summer is Susan Sontag's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's "The Lady From the Sea." The work-in-progress will have its world premiere next spring in Ferrara, Italy. But in two weeks one of the first public readings will be a main attraction at a joint benefit for the LongHouse Foundation, a cultural and horticultural center in East Hampton, and the Watermill Center.

Wilson's "Hamlet"

Sharing the spotlight at LongHouse at the Aug. 9 benefit will be Mr. Wilson's 1995 adaptation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," a monologue that he conceived, directed, designed, and performs in.

Development of Ms. Sontag's adaptation began at the center last summer. This summer Mr. Wilson will direct workshops of the play in August at the Watermill Center with Ms. Sontag and the French actress Dominique Sanda, who will star in it. An original score for the piece is being created by Wayan Sudarsana, a native Balinese drummer, and Charles Winkler, a composer from Houston.

Ms. Sanda, known for her role in the Oscar-winning film "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," will read selections from the play at the LongHouse benefit.

Interest In Freud

While some of Ibsen's earlier works helped establish him as a "feminist" playwright, "The Lady From the Sea," one of his later plays, deals more with the forces of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud is said to have been a great admirer of Ibsen's later plays.

It seems fitting, then, that Ms. Sontag, a critic and innovative essayist whom some dub as "feminist," should have chosen to adapt an Ibsen work. And equally fitting that a work admired by Freud should be developed with Mr. Wilson's help.

The director has a long-standing interest in Freud. One of his first complete plays was titled "The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud" and the chaise longue used by the psychiatrist's patients occupies a prominent place in Mr. Wilson's TriBeCa loft, along with art objects from around the world and the unusual chairs Mr. Wilson designs.

He and Ms. Sontag also worked together on the 1993 production of Ms. Sontag's "Alice in Bed."

Though "The Lady From the Sea" is being fine-tuned at the Watermill Center, there is little word as to how Ms. Sontag has interpreted, adapted, or changed the original play.

Like Mr. Wilson, an iconoclastic and often enigmatic figure, much of what comes out of the Watermill Center, a former Western Union laboratory, is shrouded in a tantalizing self-imposed mystery and a director's sense of the pregnant pause.

Neighbors know Mr. Wilson and the artists at the center are busy, and they may have read about renovations on the building, which are nearly complete, or seen a collection of actors improvising new scenes in nearby fields, but they're never quite sure what happens behind the gate to the old laboratory. Chances are, if they were invited in for a day, they'd have even more questions then they do now.

Working On Designs

"That's part of the mystique," Steven Parkey, the director of Mr. Wilson's Byrd Hoffman Foundation in Manhattan, admitted Monday from Water Mill.

Expect The Unexpected

Architectural students in residence and an international team of architects will soon start working on designs and planning for the center's buildings. Also slated to start soon are workshops on Mr. Wilson's "Death, Destruction & Detroit III," which will be staged in 1999.

The Byrd Hoffman Foundation has an additional 13 performances, installations, and projects in the works over the next two months, several of them at the Watermill Center.

The activities at the center are not generally open to the public. It instead provides a creative refuge in which new works for the stage and theater, as well as architectural and design projects, can be incubated and slowly hatched away from the public eye. This makes the readings at LongHouse all the more intriguing.

But isn't that the idea?

Mr. Wilson's audiences have come to expect anything but the expected. He has produced a 12-hour "silent" opera and once convinced 2,000 soldiers to perform on a mountaintop in Iran for one production. He cast a woman in the role of King Lear and staged a play in three languages with no translation.

Bowie Collaboration

He also collaborates across media and across cultures, incorporating many art forms into his theatrical productions. David Byrne of The Talking Heads, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg are past collaborators, and Mr. Wilson is now working with David Bowie on a millennium-marking production for the year 2000.

In his "Hamlet" he plays all the roles. At the LongHouse Foundation on Aug. 9, he will perform selections from the play in the new Mistral Pavilion, a unique big top designed for the foundation by the late Bill Moss.

Tickets are available through the LongHouse office on Hand's Creek Road in East Hampton. The LongHouse gardens will open at 5 p.m.