While the intention was for Monsters to immerse the audience in 68 minutes of 3D stereoscopic animation, transporting it to a virtual Wilsonian world staged in the cyber-domain of computer-generated environments, this was not to be the case. The curtain rose to the expansive setting of an empty stage, with only a lit scrim upstage and seated in the pit, Philip Glass at his keyboard joined by the ensemble, four singers and the conductor / music director Michael Riesman. What actually followed was 68 minutes divided into 13 scenes that alternated between projected computer animation and staged vignettes. The glasses came on, the glasses came off, as eyes adjusted from live sequences to digital imagery, from Wilson’s powerful theatrical compositions to the ghostly perspectives of pixellated worlds.

When the curtain rose on that opening scene, set to Rumi’s poem "Where Everything is Music", the minimalist staging was confined to slowly changing bluish-white light projected on the rear scrim accompanied by Glass’s tapestry of repetitive musical motifs. The effect was dazzling. Two scenes later, a large screen descended from the top of the proscenium, sealing the audience from the physical dimensions of the stage, opening the aperture of an entirely new realm of virtual space. The first impression, despite the apprehension impregnated in this dramatic entrance of the animation, was disappointment. Obviously there had been little or no opportunity to carefully match the comparatively dull color of computer-generated imagery with the intensely vivid quality of Wilson’s lighting. Furthermore, after an unimpeded view of the staged sequences, the glasses acted as an annoying barrier between the eye and the image, rather than enhancing the experience of immersion. The confrontation of the digital and the actual had obviously not been thought through in the sudden preparation of this beta version of Monsters of Grace.

In time though, a new kind of magic began to unfold. The magic of the surreal, the impossible, the transcendence of human scale, all of which underlie the essential strategy of Wilson’s theatrical vision. The first animated sequence, "Don’t Go Back to Sleep," opened with a suburban scene, a row of houses in some non-place, in non-time. A grove of trees stands to the left. The scene is a study in stasis, quiet in its stillness, but gradually, one senses that the camera has been closing in on the row of houses in extreme slow motion. Branches drift by, the houses loom nearer, and from nowhere in this placeless world, a small boy on a bicycle dissolves into view, gently approaching the foreground, and then effortlessly glides past. Like a ghost out of a Tarkosvky film. Kleiser had mused, "This is something you could just never shoot. For one thing you could never get anyone to ride that slowly. We thought it was harebrained when we saw the original idea, but as we’ve been watching it with the soundtrack, it’s mesmerizing."

After the initial reaction to the jarring juxtaposition of the 3D animation one submits to a new dimension, entirely removed from the "actualness" of the stage, the presence of the proscenium arch, the audience staring blankly ahead. One is now teetering on the brink of an otherworld that leaves the "reality" of the theater very far behind. As they say in Hollywood, "Reality Ends Here."

This hypershift must have evoked a similar reaction to those who attended the first performances of Richard Wagner’s opera, The Ring, at the famous Festpielhaus Theater in Bayreuth over one hundred years ago when the composer lowered the lights in the theater for the first time. Wagner described the event in his article, Artwork of the Future, "whereas the public, that representation of daily life, forgets the confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the expanse of the whole World."

As such, Monsters continued, oscillating between Wilson’s staging and the computer-generated sequences, each time causing the audience to shift its orientation between live theater and the dreamlike mosaic of a parallel digital universe. It flowed in typically Wilsonian abstract, non-narrative slow-motion time, a narrative of the inexplicable, the juxtaposition of the indeterminate, the temporal pace of the out-of-time.