Symphony of Rats (Play)

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    Willem Dafoe Shines His Spotlight on Theater’s Avant-Garde Past

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    The Hollywood actor looks back on the experimental performances that shaped him at the Venice Theater Biennale.What happens when an avant-garde becomes history? The question came to mind during the opening weekend of the Venice Theater Biennale, newly under the direction of Willem Dafoe.As a co-founder in 1980 of the New York City-based Wooster Group, Dafoe had a front-row view of the experimental theater of his time. In Venice, he is turning the spotlight back onto it — at the risk of the event turning nostalgic.This year’s edition is a 50th anniversary celebration for an important edition of the Theater Biennale, an annual event put together by the same organization as the (much bigger) Art Biennale. In 1975, the Italian director Luca Ronconi convened a long list of revolutionary American and European ensembles for the theater event, including La MaMa, Odin Teatret, the Living Theater and the Théâtre du Soleil.Only one of them, Odin Teatret, is actually back this year, but others are being honored through talks and exhibitions. And the Wooster Group, which has its roots in that era, opened the festival on Saturday. The next morning, that company’s longtime director, Elizabeth LeCompte, received the event’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award.While the Biennale’s lineup also includes younger stars and emerging artists, this year’s historical dive is unusual. Theater festivals tend to be singularly focused on the present, always looking for new and emerging voices. Yet there is value in revisiting the work of artists who had a significant impact on 20th-century stages.Ari Fliakos, left, plays a fictional U.S. president who is losing his mind in “Symphony of Rats.”Andrea AvezzùWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 50, the Wooster Group Is Experimenting on Itself

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      Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk reflect on their decades of making daring theater together. Just don’t call it a nostalgic exercise.The short brick building that crouches at 33 Wooster Street is known to be a haunted house. How could it not be? For this is the location of the Performing Garage, home for nearly half a century to that most storied of experimental theater troupes in New York, the Wooster Group.Performers who have acquired legendary status both among the exacting aesthetes of downtown Manhattan (Ron Vawter, Kate Valk) and on a more far-reaching level (Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray) have acted, acted out, danced, got high, stripped down, camped out, built sets, trashed sets, fallen in and out of love, and recorded and videotaped one another exhaustively in the Garage’s small but exceedingly fertile space.As for the shows themselves — usually overseen by the group’s ever-present, ever-elusive artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte — they have always had a touch of the numinous. Bending, mixing and exploding genres and media, they dissolve the boundaries between high and low, hazy memory and hard facts, reality and its representations and, yes, the living and the dead.Classic writers — Chekhov, Racine, Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein — have been resurrected in conversation with a tumultuous, shape-shifting present for an astonishing 50 years. When I first arrived in New York in the late 1970s, these shows — which played to select audiences of 100 or less — were the ones that the coolest of experimental theatergoers swooned over, gossiped about and pretended to have seen even if they hadn’t. (I can’t be on lower Wooster Street today without walking into vaporous memories of Valk and Dafoe eerily channeling and transforming O’Neill in “The Hairy Ape,” or Valk splintering into multiple simulcast selves as a soulless, preternatural femme fatale in “House/Lights.”)Scott Shepherd, foreground, in the group’s latest production, “Nayatt School Redux,” which incorporates a recording of the original.Gianmarco BresadolaWith its latest production, “Nayatt School Redux,” the group has trained its retrospective lens on itself — specifically on a play first staged at the Garage in 1978. (This reincarnation, which runs through Saturday, is completely sold out.) The result, its creators agree, is a kind of a séance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Symphony of Rats’ Revival, a Darkness Goes Underexplored

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      The Wooster Group’s staging of Richard Foreman’s play operates like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another.A president losing grip with reality. Warnings of environmental disaster and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that originally starred Kate Valk, who directs this production along with Elizabeth LeCompte, invites dark topical readings. It’s an election year, after all.So why does this production feel so sweet and escapist?For one thing, the vaudevillian madness onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, highbrow with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — does not build on its political subject matter. It’s only the surface of a far weirder, digressive production whose obsession is not with the real world but what is underneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) does not stand in for any specific politician, and can come off as an ordinary figure overwhelmed by events. In one of the show’s many dreamy lines, he says, “I seemed to have returned from a profound experience of elsewhereness.”This is what it felt like to return from a new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new shows a decade ago. And for the theater fans who mourn his loss from the cultural landscape, this Wooster Group show operates like a delightful love letter, from one giant of experimental theater to another.Foreman didn’t break traditional rules of narrative or character so much as invent his own. His surreal shows existed in their own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs were bisected by wires that turned the stage into a web. The mood was somehow both menacing and playful, its meaning ineffable and the overall effect entirely singular. Asked in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked and then said exactly what you would want the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We are living in decadent times, surrounded by nothing but trash.”“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is presented as a puppet (even his bowel movements are performed with assistance), and the stage is filled with rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the size of the wonderful actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic flair project an otherworldly deadpan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More