Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Monday, 15 October 2007
The Wooster Group: Ghosts in the Text
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.
Posted at 11.54 am in /Essays
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