Within the alternate reality of Robert Wilson lies a man of multiple realities: a director, a designer, a performer, but also a poet, a magician, a dreamer. Margery Arent Safir edits a collection of interviews and critical analyses to capture the essence of Bob Wilson as an artist and as a friend. The twenty-seven contributors include the editor and Wilson himself, each offering a different perspective on ‘Wilsonness’ and glimpses of what has made him the man he is today. Laurie Anderson reflects on her collaborations and writes, ‘I feel that I’ve known ten Bob Wilsons’ (p. 118). Here, Safir aims to display twenty-seven of them, each one presented within a different narrative: some anecdotal, some historical and some theoretical.

There are contributors who knew him before he became a name, and international stars who have worked with him in collaboration. Each narrative is detailed in a diverse way, as if trying to capture the precision of Wilson, by deconstructing him towards a point of singularity, where all the multiplicity merges into the artist himself. John Rockwell uses the term ‘Wilsonian’ to describe the work of someone who ‘refuses to conform to mainstream conventions’ (p. 45). He refers to Wilson's ‘visionary stage pictures’ and ‘a dream-like narrative logic through a succession of vivid images’ (p. 48). The high-quality illustrations (sixty-four in total, forty glossy) amount to almost one-fifth of the total number of pages (336), turning the book into a visual extravaganza that is at the heart of Wilson's stage work. This aspect of the book is so essential that, Safir concludes, ‘to give full aesthetic value to the photographs in this book, we have kept captions to a minimum’ (p. 39). And each of these is a door to a parallel universe constructed by or with Wilson, providing further clues to ‘Wilsonness’ where form is the essence and visual style plays a major role. Giuseppe Frigeni discusses Wilson's ‘theatre of images’ and how they shape a ‘“theatre of perceptive strategies”, perception being the reading of the real’ (p. 208). It is not necessary to have an actual route throughout these alternative realities as Wilson is present in every single one of them, and perceived as a mosaic. The result is a mesmerizing stream of consciousness and an experiential book. Safir confirms this with the statement, ‘he is an experience. He has to be lived more than talked about or studied’ (p. 28). The implication is that the book resembles a Wilson production (p. 36), inviting the reader to have an involvement in the endless process of meaning-making. And so the book propels the reader to take a wondrous journey through the polyphony at each reading and be present in the multiverse of Bob Wilson's stage worlds.