‘Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole?’: inside a Moby Dick production like nothing you’ve seen before

Avant-garde theater legend Robert Wilson’s final work was a bold reimagining of Melville’s classic. His collaborators explain bringing it to the Brooklyn stage

Not far into Herman Melville’s 1851 epic novel Moby-Dick, a shipowner describes the man who will take their whaler on a tragic quest. Captain Ahab, he says, is “a queer man … a grand, ungodly, godlike man”.

The same might be said of Robert Wilson. By the time he died last July at the age of 83, Wilson had transformed himself from a stuttering, gay son of conservative southern Baptist parents in Waco, Texas, into New York City’s titan of experimental theatre, opera and dance. His shows could be hours long, or even a full week. They could demand an audience to watch a performer walk with astonishing slowness across a stage, or dazzle them with rows of figures striking flamboyant poses before bright screens. Wilson collaborated with his own adopted children, with corps of performers he wrangled himself, with luminaries including Philip Glass and Tom Waits. Early on, he developed an instantly recognizable visual vocabulary, and insisted on using it until the very end.