everal of the animated sequences in Monsters project floating objects into space without background: a rotating polar bear in "An Artist Comes to Paint You", a Japanese table setting in "Let the Letter Read You", and one of the most haunting images of Monsters, the rotating, severed hand. One could imagine inserting virtual objects into the composition of the live stage, in relation to the body of the actor or physical objects, forming a visual juxtaposition, or conveying an emotion, thought, the inner workings of the unconscious mind. I invite the creators of Monsters to consider animation not as a replacement for the stage, which the work aspires to, but as an extension of its formal possibilities and an addition to its repertoire of expressive devices.

Kleiser explains that future revisions of Monsters of Grace will eliminate the staged sequences, "The entire performance runs about 70 minutes, and we have completed about half that amount on film. The rest will be done at Royce by live actors and singers. As we complete more film before future engagements, we’ll keep plugging in the segments until, eventually, the entire work is on film."

Jed Wheeler boasts that a filmic version of Monsters can exist beyond the stage, "When this is finished, it can have a life beyond its performance life. We can put this on a DVD with music and it will basically be the same piece." But as Rumi himself wrote, "the drum of the realization of the promise is beating," and one would hope that the beat of this drummer is not another special effects demonstration for the home entertainment center. San Francisco music critic Joshua Kosman wrote shortly after the premiere in his Chronicle review, "Monsters is still a work in progress and there evidently are plans to create more computerized sequences for those pieces that were done live on Wednesday. I wonder if that’s a good idea."

I couldn’t agree more. Monsters could serve as a model for future generations of theater artists inspired by new media that extend, rather than attempt to replace the stage. In seeing Robert Wilson’s vision transposed to the computer medium, the exquisite placement of objects, the subtle use of light, the hypnotically slow pacing as was so dramatically rendered in the opening bicycle sequence, one is convinced that the digitally constructed mis-en-scene can flourish artistically when its roots are nourished by the richness and mastery of experienced theatrical technique. A new form of theater, while dissolving the boundaries of the proscenium arch, can at the same time embrace that special magic of live bodies moving, singing, and speaking in the here and now, but perhaps communing with non-corporeal ones that exist beyond space and time.

Monsters of Grace is currently touring London, after which it will visit Rome, Munich, Amsterdam, before returning to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will then make its way into the heartland: Kalamazoo, Mich., Lawrence, Kansas, and Tempe, Arizona.