Still Alive & Kicking at 30

Elizabeth LeCompte once traced her interest in “The Crucible” to a single line: “Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.” As it turned out it was the Wooster Group’s own 1983 adaptation, “L.S.D … Just the High Points,” an exploration of persecution and the end of the Timothy Leary era, that was frozen; Arthur Miller apparently didn’t appreciate what the group had done with his play.And what had it done? What the Group does best: Explode and re-assemble canonical works in intensely mediated, personal spectacles. By pairing a chestnut with some unexpected twin source (in “L.S.D…” it was the Liddy/Leary debate), structures that seem mutually exclusive start to resonate with each other. The Wooster Group’s previous production, “Route 1 & 9,” had been a production of “Our Town” that, when put through the Group’s condensation process, collided with a routine performed in blackface and an amateur porn video.In the 1980s, Ms. LeCompte, the impresario, pioneered and then perfected a technique of challenging classic texts with “lowbrow” humor, complicated physical scripts, and technology. The Woosters were accused of exploitation on every front – whether because of using secretly recorded conversations or Kate Valk’s “black dialect” phone calls to a fried chicken restaurant. Funders and critics (not to mention Mr. Miller) recoiled. The Wooster Group was offending all the right people – they were the very edge of the cutting edge.Are they still? The Group is celebrating its 30th Anniversary (of a sort) this month with a production of 1998’s “House/Lights” at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s.Their more recent new productions – like the impeccably droll “To You the Birdie! (Phedre)” – have been delightful but hardly shocking. In the golden, dangerous days, the Woosters could be both.It was in 1975 that the core players of the Wooster Group – primarily Ms. LeCompte, Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, and Libby Howes – began creating productions together (the actual naming of the group would not happen until later). Ms. LeCompte was then working under Richard Schechner’s aegis in the Performance Group, which still carried the banner of the avant-garde. Peyton Smith, Willem Dafoe, and, later, Kate Valk, gravitated towards the “group within the Group,” and the Schechner banner showed signs of dipping.At that time, the American avantgarde itself was passing through an important revolution. The shift at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street was a microcosm of a larger change: The ecstatic, radical theater that had its roots in Russian and Polish practice turned either towards the autobiographical or the visually spectacular. Or, in the Wooster Group’s case, both.With “The Rhode Island Trilogy,” Ms. LeCompte’s intellectually complicated games overtook her mentor’s rituals. She siphoned off the great talent who had already collected in the iconic Performing Garage. She created works out of Spalding Gray’s painfully honest reminiscences of his mother’s suicide, making The Wooster Group’s reputation. That reputation was cemented with shocking violations of convention (like “Hula,” which finished with the nearly naked cast gaily urinating on the floor).The complexity of construction can tie a critical theorist into knots, as narratives inform and deform on screen and in the flesh. A Wooster Group show is usually a bit intimidating; there seems to be no end to the minute detail a researcher can uncover. And the difficulty of penetrating the many layers of Elizabeth LeCompte’s baroque collages might make you feel silly. Who doesn’t hate that feeling of “not getting it?The importance of the Wooster Group, though, has always lain in how easily the lay audience member can approach it. Wooster Group productions don’t require a key; they only require effort. In David Savran’s book “Breaking the Rules,” Ms. LeCompte repeats the one thing she always tells her actors before a show: “Have a good time.” They clearly obey her, and it’s the best thing to keep in mind the next time you see one of her productions.At some point in the 1990s, the press, which at first had been nasty enough to get disinvited from Wooster Group shows, caught up to the hipsters. Warm, then glowing, reviews started rolling off most presses. The academics were faster out of the gate, largely because of Richard Schechner’s importance in the scholarly community. He was training legions of tastemakers, whispering Ms. LeCompte’s name in each ear. The Wooster Group became that contradiction-in-terms, the avantgarde institution.Recently, there has been some rea son to question the continued ability of the group to excite change and confrontation. The turn-of-the-century shows, like “To You the Birdie!,” wouldn’t offend a stepped-on hornet. The once punk-edgy aesthetic resolved into formal perfection – the icy grays of the flat screen televisions and Scott Shepard’s dry voiceovers masked its arch spiritual quest. Ms. LeCompte’s innovations seemed to have gone underground, or perhaps up – into a cerebral stratosphere. Humor, always a hallmark of the group, eclipsed affront as their most obvious tool.The Wooster Group’s wildly successful 1996 production, “The Hairy Ape,” with coal-dust blackface and Willem Dafoe’s cannon-blasts of emotion, now seems to have marked the end of something. Mr. Dafoe has apparently departed for the foreseeable future (though his son is working on a documentary about the Woosters).And the suicide of Gray – though he had long since left the group – only adds to the feeling of a chapter of history closing.While contemporary theater practice has caught up to them technologically and textually, the Woosters do keep their edge – by keeping secrets. Television screens, unseen by the audience, face the performers. The crack sound and video mixers help shape the piece, by way of video clips fed onto the screens or sound bites fed into earpieces. The performers must then imitate them as best they can, letting the cue interrupt or start a course of action.That preoccupied look on a performer’s face, as she twists her body into a difficult shape, may be because some snippet of Martha Graham has caught her eye and she must do her best to emulate it. Ms. Valk has called this live manipulation “liberating. I don’t have to search for psychological thrust.” There is something deliciously sadistic about the design running the actors, and that frisson of in-the-moment creation communicates itself to us.The Group itself, while forthcoming about their creative process, forms a very closed rank. Getting inside is like earning a spot in a family (Scott Shepard, the current male lynchpin, ascended agonizingly slowly). But one way of getting an idea of where Wooster is going is through its occasional open rehearsals – and I’m happy to say the indications seem encouragingly disrespectful.The Group’s next production, “Poor Theater: a Series of Simulacra,” looks to get back to the dirt and the sweat. In painfully realized reenactments of Grotowski’s “Akropolis,” a famously influential work by the ascetic granddaddy of the radical theater, the Group comments on its own process. Showing us their perversely faithful efforts in mimicry draws attention to their astonishing rigor. They work themselves to the bone: In one open rehearsal, I watched Ari Fliakos’s overtaxed T-shirt actually rot off his body.“Poor Theater” has yet to officially open, but watching each successive workshop adds to the eventual experience. The LeCompte Way is one of palimpsests, erasures, re-draftings, and super-imposition. Seeing each rib of the piece fall into place, then, seems like a necessary part of our process as an audience.Wherever it is they’re going – whether into further refinements of technique or back to a rawer form – watching a group as (re)inventive as the Woosters remains a privilege. They might not be out on the razor’s edge anymore, but they’re still cool enough to freeze a beer.“House/Lights” at St. Ann’s Warehouse until April 10 (38 Water Street, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779).

Still Alive & Kicking at 30

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