Culture Vulture/From the Deep Archives: the Wooster Group's NAYATT SCHOOL REDUX
January 7, 1979, was a red-letter day for me. I met Stephen Holden for the first time, for drinks at Ken Emerson’s house. (A few months later Stephen and I started dating and remained partners for 14 years.) Later that evening, I went to the Performing Garage to see Nayatt School, the last section of a trilogy called “Three Places in Rhode Island” created by the Performance Group, now known as the Wooster Group. Like only a handful of other shows (Richard Foreman’s Rhoda in Potatoland was another), Nayatt School blew my little mind and forever changed my understanding of what theater could be.
Famously, Nayatt School centered on a long opening monologue by Spalding Gray (the first of what would become his specialty) about his acting career, his childhood, his depressed and suicidal mother, and his obsession with listening to radio shows and recordings of plays, specifically T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Spalding sat at a long table on a high platform inches from the audience, flanked on one side by Joan Jonas, with whom he read several passages from Eliot’s play, and on the other side by Ron Vawter, who never spoke but at one point played Brian Eno’s Discreet Music on a turntable, applied glycerine to his eyes from a small brown bottle, and “cried.” After about an hour of this orderly seminar, the action descended to the floor of the Performing Garage, and hijinks ensued. Four child actors took on roles from the final scene of Eliot’s verse drama, playing grand British ladies and gentlemen.
From my diary:
Blaring music, record players, “patient records.” Disco perfect music for slapstick fast-motion. Disco, Tchaikovsky piano concerto, eno’s discreet music. cocktail party, horror shows, sound effects. Buzzer. At the end, the children all covered up, spalding, libby & ron destroyed records, drill holes, cut w/scissors burn, then strip & squat over them. INSANE. At end libby & ron crawl across back, spalding sits in house listening to record (masturbating?)
The Wooster Group is currently in the process of creating a DVD documentary of that production from archival audio and video. To that end, the Group has mounted a performance they’re calling Nayatt School Redux: A Reaction. Kate Valk, the longest-running continuous performer with the Wooster Group, narrates as a kind of Ishmael – she alone has lived to tell the tale. She had just started working with the Group as an intern, costumer, and all-purpose assistant to Elizabeth LeCompte, the company’s director; Valk would eventually take over one of the roles in the original production. As she conducts a look back at the group’s ancient history, she’s joined by current associates Ari Fliakos, Scott Shepherd, Michaela Murphy, Maura Tierney, Suzzy Roche, Andrew Maillet, and Omar Zubair.
Sitting in the front row, watching Kate chronicle the making of Nayatt School was emotionally overpowering for me. I wept the first time video of Spalding appeared (he killed himself in 2004) and again when the live performers recreated a famous tableau, captured in a vintage photograph that would accompany the very first article about theater I published in the New York Times in 1982 (see below), another slice of ancient history.
Experimental theater goes on in New York all the time, but one doesn’t hear much about it. That is the nature of experiments – they go on in quiet laboratories without much ado until something happens, and then it becomes an event.
One such event is taking place now at the tiny Performing Garage in SoHo where the Wooster Group, the seven-member experimental troupe led by Elizabeth LeCompte, has mounted a retrospective of three pieces it has made over the last five years. For those who missed them the first time around, this is an opportunity to catch up with one of the most provocative bodies of work the experimental theater has created in the last decade.
When the Wooster Group last mounted a retrospective of its work in 1978 under the title “Three Places in Rhode Island,” it appeared to be a trilogy of abstract theater pieces charting the maturation to adulthood of Spalding Gray, an actor in the company whose autobiography provided the work’s unifying factor.
With the addition in 1980 of an “epilogue” called “Point Judith” and the appearance last year of “Route 1 & 9,” subtitled “The Last Act,” the trilogy demanded to be reconsidered as a quintet of related theater pieces transcending the autobiographical, taking in the full sweep of life from cradle to grave, and embracing the most basic dualities: male and female, art and reality, black and white.
The last three pieces in this series are on display at the Performing Garage: “Nayatt School” plays through May 23, and “Point Judith” will be performed in repertory with “Route 1 & 9” June 3 through 13.
Several members of the Wooster Group – which includes the designer Jim Clayburgh, and the actors Willem Dafoe, Libby Howes, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter besides Miss LeCompte and Mr. Gray – formerly belonged to the Performance Group, founded in 1968 by Richard Schechner. Along with the Living Theater and the Open Theater, the Performance Group was one of several experimental theater collectives in New York which began in the 1960s to challenge basic assumptions about theater.
The use of nudity and ritual, “environmental” stage settings, and radical adaptations of classical texts in productions such as “Dionysus in ’69” and “Commune” attempted to obliterate traditional distinctions between audience and actors and their characters. Unlike the Stanislavsky method of acting in which actors attempt to transform themselves into the characters they play, members of the Performance Group, under Mr. Schechner’s direction, brought their own personalities onstage and added them to the characters they played.
In the mid-’70s, Mr. Schechner began to devote more of his time to traveling and teaching, and when he left the Performance Group, the remaining members – who had consolidated under the direction of Miss LeCompte – rechristened the company the Wooster Group after the street where their theater is situated.
The actors brought with them the Performance Group’s idea of seeing themselves as creative artists rather than mere interpreters of roles, and Miss LeCompte, who was originally a painter and photographer, had a strong visual bias. So the experiment they embarked upon together was one of combining avant-garde performance styles with techniques from other media.
The company began not with a play but with improvisations based on objects and images brought in by Spalding Gray that had personal associations for him. “We began to structure it,” Mr. Gray wrote in an article at the time, “like a piece of music (concern with rhythm), like a painting (concern with light and color), and like a dance (concern with movement).”
Out of this process came “Sakonnet Point,” an almost wordless evocation of childhood and the first of “Three Places in Rhode Island.” The second and the most autobiographical of the Wooster Group’s work was “Rumstick Road.” Using taped conversations with his relatives and his own remembrances, Mr. Gray presented an emotional documentary about his mother, who committed suicide in 1967. The documentary elements appeared alongside choreographed movement and visual images inspired by themes of madness, religion, and medical treatment that surfaced in the story of Spalding Gray’s mother and would reappear in the group’s later work.
With the making of “Nayatt School,” which was intended to conclude the trilogy but proved to be the model for two subsequent pieces, Miss LeCompte came to the forefront as the organizing intelligence of the Wooster Group’s creative collaboration. “The thing I try to do in theater is what can’t be done anywhere else,” says the director. “It’s big, and it’s simple.”
Miss LeCompte’s technique as a director is to develop strong, emotionally charged images – through words or images or movements suggested by the actors – and then to juxtapose them with other highly charged elements. The result is not a linear play at all but a kind of mixed-media collage, something unique in the theater; like a Bosch or Dali canvas come to life. Multiple stories and themes emerge and resonate against one another only to circle back on themselves rather than being neatly resolved.
“Nayatt School,” for instance, examines medicine and religion as healing forces. It uses three comic-horror stories performed as slapstick routines, a scene from T. S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party” with several roles played by children, and some autobiographical vestiges from “Rumstick Road.” The piece opens with a monologue in which Mr. Gray discusses his acting career, his mother’s psychiatric treatment, and her Christian Science faith.
“Point Judith,” according to Miss LeCompte, is about “forming new structures for the family.” It juxtaposes three examples of community: the all-male crew of an oil rig, as characterized in a short play called “Rig,” written for the company by Jim Strahs; a group of nuns (played by the same male actors), seen on film frolicking by the sea; and the family in “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” a portion of which is surreally acted out.
“When we read ‘Our Town’ over and over again, for me it was like saying a prayer,” Miss LeCompte recalls. “It was calming and soothing. It was everything you knew had no relevance in your life any more, but it was still beautiful to listen to. It’s so sentimental, and I don’t know how I feel about sentiment. But I know I love it. I war with myself constantly, going back and forth between irony and sentiment.”
“Route 1 & 9” is the most complex of the Wooster Group’s work. The piece juxtaposes a soap-opera version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” shown on video monitors, with an old Pigmeat Markham vaudeville routine performed in blackface by members of the company. It begins with a video reconstruction of a 1950s educational film in which a lecturer gives an absurdly dry analysis of “Our Town,” and it ends with a crude sex film featuring the Wooster Group actors shown on an old black-and-white television set. It contemplates the distinction between high art and low art and the status of white people and black people in our society.
“On an almost stupid, clichéd level,” says Miss LeCompte, “it’s a battle between humans and machines.” The actors on the TV screen, for instance, seem much more intimate than the live actors in blackface, a paradox suggesting that the machinery is as much a cover-up for the truth as the makeup. Ultimately, like “Our Town,” “Route 1 & 9” concerns death, mourning, and the loss of innocence.
“When we read ‘Our Town’ over and over again, for me it was like saying a prayer,” Miss LeCompte recalls. “It was calming and soothing. It was everything you knew had no relevance in your life any more, but it was still beautiful to listen to. It’s so sentimental, and I don’t know how I feel about sentiment. But I know I love it. I war with myself constantly, going back and forth between irony and sentiment.”
The richness and density of “Route 1 & 9” and its companion pieces can be bewildering at times. Each one contains moments of chaos that are inextricably a part of Miss LeCompte and her company’s vision of the world. But there is also humor, intellectual substance, and fine acting, especially by Mr. Gray, who is a beguiling guide through the Wooster Group’s avant-garde theatrics. Ironically, Mr. Gray has become so attached to the out-front person he created for “Nayatt School” that he has launched a second career as a comic monologuist. Since 1979, he has toured American and Europe with his autobiographical storytelling.
Meanwhile, the Wooster Group has become embroiled in controversy. The New York State Council on the Arts rescinded the company’s funding for “Route 1 & 9,” judging the blackface sequences to be “harsh and caricatured portrayals of a racial minority.” The Wooster Group has appealed the decision as a misapprehension of its work. The current retrospective is, in effect, part of the appeal; it enables spectators disoriented by “Route 1 & 9” to see its theatrical devices in the context of the Wooster Group’s ongoing work, in which anti-naturalistic acting (children playing grownups, men playing women, whites playing blacks) is but one of several experimental elements. The Council will consider the appeal in a meeting on June 11.
Many people in the New York arts community have rallied in support of the Wooster Group while at the same time engaging in sometimes heated debates about the relationship between content and form, images of racism in our culture, and the social responsibility of art. It is a significant measure of the Wooster Group’s success that the company has stirred up such excitement within what has been, in recent years, the rather placid experimental theater scene. For the nature of experimental theater – from Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” to the theories of Antonin Artaud – has always been to jar expectations, to question the status quo, and to provoke audiences to see the world through new eyes.
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