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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

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      Review: ‘The Mother’ Rises Up Again in the Name of Revolution

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      The Wooster Group’s production will prompt discussions about the company’s vision for Brecht’s “learning play.”There’s a bit of an echo when the actors in the Wooster Group’s production of “The Mother” speak. At first I assumed that their voices were being digitally filtered. This would have been par for the course for the company, whose longstanding affinity for technological wizardry is well known. And it would have been an ingenious idea for a Bertolt Brecht play, reinforcing the alienation effect the playwright sought by subtly reminding us we were watching a show.Soon, though, I realized it was wizardry of another kind: For much of the time the actors were miming their own recorded lines. Unlike Deirdre O’Connell’s performance in “Dana H.” on Broadway, where lip-syncing never gets in the way of a devastating emotional realism, the Woosters go for an arch theatricality in the service of the story’s agitprop roots. Since they mostly sing the show’s brief numbers live, I found myself looking out for the transitions between what was recorded and what was not.In Brecht’s “The Mother” — not to be confused with his own “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which it predates by seven years — an apolitical woman named Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk, magnetic as ever) is pulled into communist activism after her son (Gareth Hobbs) is jailed for fighting on behalf of factory workers.The show, first produced in Germany in 1932, was inspired by a 1906 Russian novel by Maxim Gorky and Brecht conceived it as a “learning play.” A narrator (Jim Fletcher) helpfully fills us in on the historical and literary background in a prologue, and pops up again at regular intervals to essentially provide footnotes. It’s as if we are watching a play and reading its CliffsNotes at the same time, extending the learning process to the directing style.The Wooster Group, now in its 46th year, has acquired a reputation for cerebral, often opaque productions, and it’s true that the company’s shows can be puzzling. This one, directed, like most of them, by Elizabeth LeCompte, is no exception. (It premiered in June at the Vienna Festival.)But the process often has a degree of transparency because the company is not shy about listing its sources and regularly uploads to its website a variety of informative videos, including excerpts from rehearsals, that help contextualize what audience members end up seeing. In one of the videos for “The Mother,” for example, Valk says that the company was attracted to the story of a woman who becomes radicalized in her 60s. It is hard not to think of LeCompte, 77, and Valk, 65, who continue to explore theater with an energy and inquisitiveness people a third of their age might envy.It might be fair to say (warn?) that some of the Wooster Group shows, like its head-scratching “Hamlet,” in which they repurposed Richard Burton’s performance from 1964, can be less involving to experience than to discuss with your friends in a doomed attempt to figure out what the company was trying to do.And so it goes with “The Mother.” The production both hews to the original text and honors the theatrical traditions that birthed it, and then it tweaks them. Hanns Eisler’s original score is sometimes juxtaposed with a new one by Amir ElSaffar, for example, and in some scenes ElSaffar’s jazzy music combines with the actors’ staccato delivery to create something akin to a 1930s Warner Bros. noir about the workers’ struggle. Why the Woosters went for that effect — well, we could meet over a drink and talk about it for a few hours.The MotherThrough Nov. 6 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More