If you think of it as an extension of his Eastern-inspired meditative practice, everything here is of a piece: McDermott’s obsessions with Lao Tzu, the I Ching and the Rig Veda weave naturally with the slowly transforming, churning arpeggios that are Glass’s trademark. Your tolerance for this might depend on your relationship with Glass’s music.
In the second half, McDermott is joined by three puppeteers as the scenes becomes dreamier, drifting for what feels like too long before returning to the initial focus on music - the Essence, “the Tao which cannot be said.”
On the first level, Consensus Reality, “Tao” has the appearance of a workaday one-man show, with McDermott sharing memories and fondly miming Glass conducting with his hair at the keyboard during early performances. McDermott is an effortlessly endearing, self-deprecating host, so passionate when speaking about Glass’s music that he’s reminiscent of the Man in Chair from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a narrator with an infectious delight for his favorite Broadway cast album.
The comedic moment past, he begins, “This is my favorite bit.” Then a spotlight shines on him, and he looks out at the audience in shocked horror, playing out a bad dream many have. As the lights go down, McDermott is in the aisle, carrying a Skirball tote bag on his shoulder, pretending to look for his seat in the dark. The show is metatheatrical from the start.
On its most basic level, the production is “the story of a show that never happened,” McDermott says, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” But eventually, “Tao” becomes the story of its own creation. Here, for the first time, McDermott and Glass have built something together from scratch - written, co-directed (with Kirsty Housley) and performed by McDermott, with an original score by Glass. That, we learn in “Tao of Glass,” which opened at NYU Skirball in New York on Thursday, comes from an affection that runs deep, and far into the past. McDermott truly gets Glass’s music, and so can act as a kind of visual translator.
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