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Tuesday, 16 October 2007
In recognition of The Wooster Group's production of Hamlet
currently running at The Public Theater, I offer here "Ghosts in the
Text," an
essay about the Group that brings together several posts regarding the
collective that ran on earlier iterations of this blog:
My first experience with The Wooster Group (and these days, and given
the technological wizardry for which the group has become known, it might
be more accurate to call it an "interface") occurred on a cold winter
night in late 1983 or 1984. The play was L.S.D. (Just the High
Points), the group's reinterpretation of Arthur Miller's high-school
stand-by The Crucible. Before entering the group's small 99-seat
performance space, The Performing Garage, on Soho's Wooster Street, I
thought I'd known The Crucible, but at the end of the 90 minute
performance, I re-emerged into the cold night air realizing that, until
that performance, I hadn't really known it at all.
I don't think my experience was unique. I had, unfortunately, seen a
radically shortened version of the original three-part L.S.D., but
enough of the original was left to allow some of that original production
to shine through. Director Elizabeth LeCompte and the cast (which included
original Wooster Group members Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray, along with
Kate Valk, who joined the group as a seamstress a few years earlier) put
Miller's text through a variety of twists and turns, staging it at a long
conference table reminiscent of the 1950s-era HUAC hearings that had
served as one inspiration for the play; and Valk's black-faced Tituba
impressively drove home just that metaphysical hysteria that gripped the
original Salem witch trials, its other obvious inspiration. It may, for
all its inversions of Miller's own realist dramaturgy, have been the most
loyal
interpretation of the original text that had been produced until that
time.
I also discuss several later productions of The Group, including
House/Lights and The Emperor Jones. You can read the entire
essay here.
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Superfluities
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by George
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