Robert Wilson, Rufus Wainwright, and the Berliner Ensemble take on Shakespeare’s famously enigmatic poems

William Shakespeare never meant for any of his sonnets to take the stage. Still, are we really surprised that these poems of unrequited desire and mortality, authored by the greatest English playwright, are overflowing with dramatic potential? Director Robert Wilson and composer Rufus Wainwright, with the help of Bertolt Brecht’s legendary Berliner Ensemble, have adapted 25 of the sonnets for the stage, with shockingly beautiful results. Shakespeare’s Sonnets is now making its U.S. debut at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, after a 2009 premiere in Berlin. One might assume that a collaboration of such huge artistic personalities is doomed to suffer from too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome, resulting in an array of incoherencies. Happily to the contrary, each creative voice takes up the space it rightfully deserves, blending into a complete event in which no element feels out of place.