Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

Ghosts in the Text:
Thirty Years and More of The Wooster Group
October 2007

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.

But that was the winter of 1983, and the eighth year of the Group's existence. There was no way of telling, then, that things would radically change for both the Group and its individual members over the next few years. In September 1984, Miller's lawyers issued the cease-and-desist order that stopped performances of the original L.S.D. Then individual members of the troupe began to experience the beginnings of their own break-out careers: in fact, at the same time that I saw L.S.D., Gray was breaking in his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, the 1987 film of which would make him a near-household name; in 1986 Dafoe would be nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Oliver Stone's Platoon. Finally came David Savran's canonical interpretation of the Group's early work, his 1986 book Breaking the Rules, which covered the Group's productions from the early Three Places in Rhode Island trilogy through the controversial Route 1 & 9 and, finally, L.S.D., which wasn't completed in its final version until 1985.

For over twenty years, Savran's book was the only substantial study of the Group's productions (a lack which will be remedied with this autumn's publication of Andrew Quick's The Wooster Group Work Book from Routledge). But the Group's work, often with many of its original participants, went on. Then last year, in 2006, LeCompte and the Group turned their attention for the first time to Shakespeare: and not only Shakespeare, but his most famous play, Hamlet, which will receive its official New York premiere (the St. Ann's production earlier in 2007 was not open to critics) at the Public Theater this autumn.

The road from 1975's Sakonnet Point to this fall's Hamlet has over the years taken a variety of twists, especially when it comes to the Group's treatment of the dramatic text. While their first play was based on autobiographical texts by Spalding Gray, LeCompte and the company began to integrate traditional dramatic texts with the use of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party in Rumstick Road in 1976, and the group hasn't looked back. In fact, for a group with a reputation for innovative performance practice, they've chosen texts firmly within the Western theatrical tradition: Thornton Wilder's Our Town for Route 1 & 9; Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters for Brace Up!; Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, and on and on.

Looking back at these productions, and their treatment of these well-known texts, a pattern begins to emerge in the Group's treatment of these plays. Surprisingly, as with The Crucible, their interpretations have tended to serve as uniquely faithful to the originals, but faithful in a new manner. Instead of deconstructing the texts, taking them apart and fragmenting them across two hours or so of playing time, one has the sensation that more than anything else LeCompte and the Group have turned these plays inside-out, revealing the cultural and psychic interiors of the plays. In Route 1 & 9, alongside Our Town, the landscape of the 1930s American town in Grovers Corners became the same field of community as the stretch of suburban New Jersey highway referenced in the title; the play was introduced with a parody of Clifton Fadiman's condescending film "introduction" to the Wilder piece. The anatomy is still recognizable, but LeCompte and the performers have engaged in a unique demonstration of the living textual body, its sinews and blood no longer hidden from sight by the skin of traditional theatre practice, but newly revealed, discovering what they'd already contained, with an eye to the unceasing contemporeity of a text's underlying passions.

And, in a sense, this turning outward makes visible spirits which underlay the words and characters of these plays. At the center of many of these plays is the figure of the ghost, from the cemetery in Our Town to the spirits which haunt the electricity of House/Lights, their production of Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights. At the same time, ghosts have collected around the Group, which is now entering its fourth decade of productions: the presences of Spalding Gray (who died in 2004), Paul Schmidt (the translator of Three Sisters, 1999) and Ron Vawter (1994) continue to haunt the Group's work on and off stage. A survey of some of the Wooster Group's productions of classic dramatic texts since that chilly evening in 1983 demonstrates the seeming inevitability of LeCompte's attraction to Hamlet, a death and ghost-haunted play. It also demonstrates the viability of their project, and its ability to draw new young performers like Ari Fliakos and Scott Shephard into its brood.

Ghosts of Moscow

The Wooster Group has developed a repertory of work that can be revived from time to time; LeCompte has never been afraid to revisit past productions, and a number of these plays continue to tour. Indeed, the group took up Chekhov as early as 1991's Brace Up!, their version of Three Sisters, following two collaborations with Richard Foreman in the mid-1980s and one with playwright Jim Strahs.

The first formal innovation of Brace Up! was to turn the story of three women dreaming of Moscow into ... well, a story. Kate Valk served as the literal narrator of the evening, speaking directly to the audience, describing stage directions and plot details, on a stage strewn (as usual with the Group's productions) with several television sets upon which the faces of the onstage characters appear and reappear. Chekhov's notoriously indirect dialogue becomes even more indirect as it's split between the bodied and disembodied performers.

This was a departure from the group's previous use of video in their work. "Brace Up! was the first time that characters who were live on stage were also presented live on video," Wooster Group founding member Jim Clayburgh told Jason Zinoman in a 2005 interview for Time Out New York. "The layers of sound had gotten more complex." The spirituality of the work would become even more complex, another layer of sound and presence added, after the 1990 death of translator Paul Schmidt. In the 1991 production of Brace Up!, Schmidt had appeared in the show as the Doctor; in the 2003 revival of the show at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse, he appeared again, on videotape.

In his review of the revival for The New Yorker, Hilton Als wrote that the Group "push[ed] Three Sisters into the realm of performance as performance, something quite separate from the conventional realist theatre's goal of representing life as it is. Brace Up! is about a real event in life -- but that event is one you are watching on stage." In its use of Schmidt's videotape presence, Brace Up! also is about death in life, the ability technology offers to allow the dead to haunt the living. As LeCompte alienated the play from its original Stanislavskian context, the technology alienated role from actor, death from life, the presence of both unquestionable -- detaching genre from text to reach a deeper metaphysical truth within.

Light and Shadow

House/Lights, a 1999 production revived in 2005, came to be regarded as one of the group's signature productions. Wildly technological, utilizing a variety of media from 16mm reduction prints of cheap soft-core pornography to a sound design which echoed and reechoed a variety of noises and voices, it nonetheless also represented the Group's core faith to an unvarnished, bare humanity beneath the palimpsests of stage technology.

The texts that comprised House/Lights were Gertrude Stein's 1938 Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and a 1964 sexploitation film, Olga's House of Shame. These were presented in parallel in rather large chunks instead of a fully-integrated pastiche, and both shared themes of hell and the soul. Stein's Faustus (bringer of light) is the film's Elaine (a dominatrix-in-training), nominally under the instruction of Mephistopheles/Olga. The question which emerges early in the first "act" is whether or not Faustus/Elaine has a soul to sell to Mephistopheles/Olga in the first place, and whether this sale can hinge on the invention of electric light, with its potential to render the natural sun and moon superfluous, and sadomasochistic sexual betrayal, with its potential to render more complex emotional engagement superfluous as well.

For Stein, language expresses the potential of spirit. Valk's performance of the Stein text (and she recited the bulk of it herself) was light and airy in a manner that elicited the highly enunciated rhythm and clarity of the text. Valk proved herself one of the most soulful performers on the New York stage in House/Lights, an ideal interpreter of Stein's contemplative sing-song, possessed also of a deft comic touch that draws sympathy to her characters' existential plight -- her vaudeville turn in-two with a rubber viper was one of the highlights of the show. Stein's text, married to the jaw-droppingly dopey narration of the exploitation film, contributed to the bizarre lingustic dimension of an operatic soundscape; and sometimes it was a literally operatic soundscape, with snatches of Wagner and Tchaikovsky giving the whole a touch of passionate 19th-century European Romanticism. (The Wooster Group seems to share this affection for Romanticism with Foreman.)

LeCompte's industrial stage-scape, all clean, metallic steel bars and McLuhan-cool video presentation, was also a historically-textured space. The clear filament bulbs that crisscrossed downstage and above the playing area, swaying as it were in the linguistic wind of the text, provided one historical context, a recall of the 1920s and 1930s during which Stein flourished; the cheap hand-held black-and-white cinematography of the 1964 film seemed to suck any sincerity out of the passion that the movie characters try to represent; and finally, there was the instant remembrance of contemporary video technology, instantaneously capturing time as the seconds click by.

And yet, at moments, all this stopped. During a quiet moment at the end of the play, when Olga's paramour Nick confessed his passion for Elaine, all technology seemed to stop -- suddenly the electronic voice amplification and manipulation were suspended, and there was a breathtaking moment of human voices without the interposition of technology. The production suddenly glimpsed something at the bottom of a pool of mud, in a passing clear eddy of water.

For all their high-tech stage practice, The Wooster Group always had a soft spot for the non-technological human voice, the non-technological human body. The palimpsests of digital science layered on top of this human experience seem to have accreted over the years since the Group first explored childhood, identity and remembrance in the Rhode Island trilogy, and as their practice and talent has matured so has the Group found classic literature more resonant. In so doing they seem to have been drawn to the contemplation of mortality and the after-life in pieces like this and their homage to Chekhov.

As House/Lights demonstrated, the human tragedy of the machine age is not that technology has robbed us of our souls. The tragedy is that it hasn't.

The Actress, The Soul, The Role

However much the Group may be conceived as a collaborative entity, it did produce a unique stage star all on its own, Kate Valk, a woman who has never performed outside of the Group's productions (unlike Gray, Vawter and Dafoe). She was certainly at the center of House/Lights, its most memorable actress: she spoke the entire text of the Stein play, and Stein's words were never so musical, so sensible, than when they came through Valk. Her performance embodied not only the words of the play, but its peculiar and idiosyncratic grammar as well, a physical performance composed mostly of small gestures as Stein's language depends on the recognition of small shifts of vocabulary, of pause, of sentence structure.

Stein's language came through Valk as echoes of an interior perspective, consciousness of a world construction made visible and audible: all process, little graspable product. Much different from her performance in the very different 1995/2006 The Emperor Jones, but then, Eugene O'Neill is not Stein by any stretch, regardless of the fact that they're contemporaries.

Stein is silences and atoms of language: O'Neill is all noise and bluster, endless floods of words rather than a mist of language, and in plays like this and All God's Chillun Got Wings, there's also that awful, terrible dialect, black American English filtered through a writer too much enamored of turn-of-the-century melodrama. The Group had taken on O'Neill before, in bits and pieces from Long Day's Journey into Night integrated in the Rhode Island trilogy's Point Judith. But that was late O'Neill, this is the O'Neill of the 1930s. Valk's performance of this language was entirely different -- Stein's work eased through her. With O'Neill, she grabbed the language hungrily, embracing it with all its embarrassing overstatement, pouring it through her and spilling it out again, flooding the stage with its passion. But in this overstatement of hers she also found the human heart of O'Neill's drama, a heart that O'Neill could be accused of burying under all that awful, cloddish posturing of his language.

And in a way, she found and exhibited the spirit of O'Neill's text in the smallest but most remarkably effective of physical gestures. Though in blackface, Ms. Valk left her arms and legs untouched: quite white. So when they became visible underneath the heavy, overwrought, Kabuki-inspired costumes, Ms. Valk became the vulnerable, marginalized, tragic figure that O'Neill envisioned, but more: as a white woman playacting as a black man, she embodied the vulnerability of all humanity. Those late scenes of the play, in which Jones reenacts a sketchy racial memory of torture and a slave auction, therefore echoed the grotesque sadism and possessiveness of the entire species. More than O'Neill intended, I'm sure, and even a profound parody and satire of O'Neill's excesses, it was elicited by LeCompte from Valk's extraordinary personation. It was a conscious decision to absorb and echo these voices, that enter her as the creation of others, but emerge as her own expression, a part of her own soul, and a part of ours.

Badminton and Desire

The 2002 premiere of To You, the Birdie!, the Group's rendering of Racine's Phedre (and their first crack at a text from the classical repertoire), was conducted in an atmosphere of both Hollywood and Soho glamour: On stage, film actress Frances McDormand puffed cynically away on cigarette after cigarette as the nurse Oenone, and Willem Dafoe, by then an accomplished and popular movie star himself, bared his chest as Theseus; in the audience, downtown stalwarts like Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed could be found in attendance. By then, too, the Group had outgrown their small 99-seat Performing Garage space, the premiere could only be contained in the cavernous St. Ann's Warehouse in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn -- a 14,000 square foot space that could hold 1,200. But the Group chose this space, perversely, to present their most sexually explicit production to date.

Once again utilizing a translation by Paul Schmidt, the action was set at a remove by Scott Shepherd's mumbling, Lenny Bruce-like narration, but at the center was Valk's Phedre: a dissolute queen who can't even take a shit without the ministrations of her nurse, but drawn nonetheless by desire to her stepson Hippolytus (Ari Fliakos). LeCompte located the back-and-forth nature of airy sexual desire in the game of badminton that was conducted through the length of the play: a comic irony that rendered the wheelchair-bound Phedre even more ridiculous.

Tragic, too: the body disconnected from the soul, physical weakness unable to express the metaphysical strength of will. LeCompte and the Group played with audience expectation, and no doubt many of those attending wanted to see the masculine, well-toned body of the film star Dafoe in the flesh (and they got it, over and over, in person as well as through a sinuous video depiction of every pec and ripple of Defoe's chest). But all this fleshed desire continued to be maintained in the technological precision of the Group's aesthetic, by now hardened into cold steel and set off by stylistic anachronisms like fake palm trees.

But again, the Group's attention and respect for the text was paramount. In turning the body of Racine's text inside out, without introducing textual anachronisms (the anachronism was in Shepherd's and the cast's laconic delivery), 21st-century modernist mannerism was discovered to be as precise a contemporary performance practice as 17th-century French theatrical classicism, opening the text to a new century.

LeCompte's selection of a 300-year-old text may have seemed unique, but in a sense, in the history of the Group's production, it wasn't: Phedre is, after all, a family play, as much a family play as the Rhode Island trilogy, which explored the themes of family relationship and death through images suggested by Spalding Gray and his family's history of mental illness. Only four years later the Group would take up another family play, another spectacle of desire and lust, maybe the most famous: Shakespeare's Hamlet.

More to Come

In moving back to Manhattan and the Public Theater for the Hamlet production, the Group returns triumphantly to its home neighborhood, but in a different context. The Public, unlike the Performing Garage, is unapologetically an institutional Off-Broadway theatre, often a stepping-stone to productions uptown. After more than a quarter-century of work, the production of Hamlet may be a new beginning, a new glance at the brighter lights further north. What so many people, from Tony Randall to Herbert Blau, have tried and failed to establish -- a repertory theatre of American actors and actresses, forming a company that performs both contemporary and classic plays -- the Wooster Group has, rather surprisingly, succeeded.

For a collective which has had the longevity of the Wooster Group, the question inevitably arises as to the viability of its future. The responses come from a variety of sources. Its aesthetic has already influenced the raw, technology-aware work of younger groups like Radiohole, the Collapsible Giraffe, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf and Banana Bag & Bodice. There are also, though, the hidden, less publicised aspects of the group's efforts. Unsung but a major Wooster Group project, for many years the Group has been conducting summer programs with New York children and teenagers, helping them explore theatrically their attitudes towards their lives: this year, Valk led a program that centered on these young people's experience with hospitals. Finally, the Group continues to branch out into other forms. Obviously, the appeal of video and film has always been strong for them, but in 2006, for the first time, LeCompte and the Group turned their attention to an opera, Francesco Cavalli's La Didone, which was staged at Edinburgh in August 2007 following its world premiere in Brussels in May.

And then there is the group-as-maturing-collective itself, which has created a body of work that constantly questions and echoes its own aesthetic history (the blackface that drew such controversy to the early Route 1 & 9 and L.S.D. formed a central thematic motif in The Emperor Jones); there are still the ghosts. In Hamlet, among the usual ghosts, will be Richard Burton's, whose 1960s-era Broadway production serves as a stepping-off point for the Wooster Group production; in the Group's recent Poor Theatre, an self-critical examination of the early aesthetic history of the troupe, both Gray and Vawter's spirits hovered in the wings. At the same time, LeCompte is moving backwards, deeper into the history of the traditional Western dramatic canon. The names are changing, of course: instead of Gray and Vawter, the actors on stage are now Shepherd and Fliakos, and there's a sense of passing-the-baton. After more than thirty years, the Group's aesthetics can no longer be seen as experimental, avant-garde; like the texts they choose, they are precisely within the Western theatrical performance tradition. And if this points the way uptown, it also points the way forward.

George Hunka: Home Page

Superfluities Redux: Home Page