New York Times Music Review: "Flowers From the Cotton Fields ‘Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter,’ by Robert Wilson"

Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter From left, Robert Osborne, Karma Mayet, Carla Duren and Darynn Zimmer in the premiere of Robert Wilson’s opera, presented by Peak Performances at the Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey.  (Stephanie Berger/New York Times)

Cast members in “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter,” about a self-taught black painter in the Deep South.  (Stephanie Berger/New York Times)                          

Sheryl Sutton as the silent Angel.  (Stephanie Berger/New York Times)

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New York Times 

A young woman wearing a boldly patterned dress emerges from a door-shaped opening in a brightly painted curtain. She grins widely. “I’m Clementine Hunter,” she exclaims.

As a “life of” piece, “Zinnias,” which opened on Saturday as part of the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University, is a throwback to Mr. Wilson’s early years. He made his name in the 1960s and ’70s with a series of slow, sprawling abstractions posing as biographies: “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud,” “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” “Edison” and of course, “Einstein on the Beach,” his epochal collaboration with Philip Glass.

The ostensible subjects of those frequently mystifying pieces would never stoop to something as conventional as introducing themselves. Einstein does a lot of violin playing but says nothing throughout a five-hour opera.

So the forthright enthusiasm of Mr. Wilson’s Clementine Hunter, in real life a black plantation worker in Louisiana who achieved renown as a self-taught painter, comes as something of a shock. Mr. Wilson has made “Zinnias” recognizably his own while working with a sweetly easygoing score by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Toshi Reagon, her daughter; and a book by Jacqueline Woodson. Its colored-light backdrops, elegant white furniture and angular, repetitive gestures will be familiar to his fans.