“It’s a fun cocktail!”: Wooster Group’s surprising mix of high and low art | platform

SPalding Gray used to do a show called Meet the Public. The famous monologue was inviting a stranger he met in the hallway to join him on stage. Through a series of benign questions, he would prompt them to open up about their lives. In one of the shows, one of the guests broke the hearts of the audience by talking about the murder of her daughter. On good nights, people living with HIV shared their stories. Other times, the stories can be whimsical or entertaining. They showed us “what it means to live in the world,” Gray said.

Watching Gray conjure up this material made a big impression on a young actor named Scott Shepard. This was the show he saw on his first visit to Performance Garage, the New York home of the Wooster Group. The pioneering company was founded a few years ago by Gray and director Elizabeth Lecompte along with colleagues Kate Falk, Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith.

“The interviews with the audience were absolutely amazing,” Shepherd says. “His first question was always the same: ‘How did you get to the theatre?’ – and there would be some story about the subway or the taxi, and somehow, he would find a thread of that story into the person. It was one of the great early theatrical experiences of my life.”

By this time, Falk had an equally transformative experience at the Performing Garage, a theater so small there was no room for an atrium and some seats could only be reached by climbing a ladder. As a curious acting student, she headed to the SoHo venue to see Spalding Gray in two autobiographical pieces, Sakonnet Point (1975) and Rumstick Road (1977). She was hooked.

“I gave up my apartment and moved upstairs,” Falk says, joining Shepard on the video call. “It was a great group of artists. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to drop everything and move here because this is the place for me.'”

Valk became part of the Wooster Group in 1979, initially working as a seamstress and soon becoming an actress. She has rarely worked outside the company since: “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Now, in a kind of posthumous tribute, both actors return to the role that Gray created in The Nyatt School (1978). This was the piece that followed Sakonnet Point and Rumstick Road in the Rhode Island Trilogy and was Gray’s first foray into autobiographical monologues, a precursor to such pieces as Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box.

Coming to London’s Coronet Theater, Nayatt School Redux isn’t quite a revival, but a reimagining of the 1978 show in a very Wooster Group way. “When we go back to look at old work, it’s not as if the artist can pull her old painting out of the warehouse and look at it,” says Lecompte, who lived with Gray in the 1970s. “We can’t do that. We only have very degraded, black-and-white materials to work from.”

While Gray – who died in 2004 – was once a friend and colleague, he is now a character in a play based on a play he made. “We are as close to directing his performance at the Niatt School as possible,” Falk says. “I’m the survivor, because I’m still in the group. I knew him, I worked with him, I was young, and now I’m old and I’m the one who translates and tells you what he did. My monologue is like a palimpsest across Spalding Peak.”

“It’s another act of directing or ventriloquism,” Shepherd says, recalling the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2005) in which he parodied an archival recording of Richard Burton. “It’s more literal this time, because I’m wearing some of the clothes that Spalding wore when he did the show. It looks a little weird.”

The Niatt School took its name from the school in Barrington, Rhode Island, where Gray grew up, and it bore all the hallmarks of LeCompte. Primarily among these elements was the juxtaposition of disparate elements in a collage-like manner. The production mixed vaudeville radio skits with T. S. Eliot’s post-war play The Cocktail Party, which was itself a strange mixture of drawing-room comedy and esoteric religious debate.

Elliot Gray’s play fascinated me not only because he had a recording featuring Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, but also because one of its characters, Celia Copleston, goes on a spiritual journey that ends in her martyrdom. This reminded him of his mother, a Christian scientist, who committed suicide when he was 26 years old. (It is believed that it was Gray himself who jumped from the Staten Island ferry to his death.)

The fusion of popular culture and high art has characterized the work of the Worcester group. In 1984, LSD (Just the High Points) sat at the intersection of Timothy Leary’s countercultural drug use and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In 1988, Frank Dale’s film The Temptation of Saint Anthony brought together Gustave Flaubert and Lenny Bruce. And 1997’s House/Lights was a film that was half Gertrude Stein and half sexploitation.

The company has made unexpected connections between Baroque opera, B-grade science fiction films, Noh theater, and Chekhov. For Lecompte, who is trained in drawing and photography, such collisions in her head are the way she sees the world. “I grew up with TV and art, and they do it all the time,” she says. “You can go from a more serious soap opera scene to a toothpaste ad. When I was a kid, I thought: ‘Oh, they’re in the bathroom and they’re going to get out of the bathroom and continue the scene.’ I didn’t see that you needed to relate those things in any rational way.

She compares her technique to frottage, the artistic practice pioneered by Max Ernst in which pencil rubs are taken from rough surfaces to create something new. “This is what I do with texts and people,” Lecompte says, rubbing her hands to illustrate. “Performers are physical and I like to interact with them.”

“Not in the literal sense,” she hastily adds, laughing.

The effect can be confusing. It can be funny too. “It’s fun when it’s high/low,” Falk says. “For example, this challenging writing by Gertrude Stein juxtaposed with a girl gang from a 1960s B movie. It’s a fun combination, like a cocktail. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense or plausibility, but you put the source material and the script so that they vibrate against each other and then somehow grow together.”

“Combining high and low has a double benefit,” Shepherd adds. “It removes the high thing from its base and you can appreciate the earthly humanity that is encoded there. On the other hand, something sublime is revealed in the low thing.”

Running these sets can be challenging, but once LeCompte sets her course, she never abandons an idea. Shepherd gives the example of Vieux Carré (2008), where they took a play by Tennessee Williams and placed it on Paul Morrissey’s films from Andy Warhol’s Factory. “We wanted to bring a sense of realism from those movies into this Tennessee Williams script,” he says. “We had to try to abandon different parts of the films because they didn’t fit the scene. It took us a while to get the right parts. Sometimes we know it doesn’t work, but not at the level of the whole project falling apart.”

Matching the film’s live actors and recorded audio requires discipline. Even if the Wooster Group’s performance leaves you scratching your head, you’ll never lose your admiration for the precision of the actors and technicians. “As performers, Scott, Ari, Ari Fliakos and I — the entire middle period in the Wooster group — are athletic,” Falk says. “With the copying, speed, dexterity and technical skills needed to follow up and respond physically, there’s a feat to be accomplished. All three of us are enjoying it.”

It’s entertaining for the audience, too, and if any of this seems clunky, it’s to downplay LeCompte’s sense of joy and wonder. She is an author less austere than enthusiastic, delighting in the absurdities of life and art. When Falk refers to the company’s “career,” LeCompte raises her eyebrows, adopts a cartoonish horror expression and draws scary quotes in the air. Imagine calling it a career! At 82 and looking decades younger, she still retains her sense of joy and mischief. She flashes another big smile and heads off to rehearsal.

Nayatt School Redux will be at the Coronet Theatre, London, from April 17-25