Times Quotidian

Rattler Makes a Day

February 11, 2019 | by Guy Zimmerman | Filed Under: Performance

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The Wooster Group does this thing they’ve developed where the actors listen to some prerecorded text and re-enact it for us. The technique straddles the hi-lo divide between Bertolt Brecht on the one side, and your local karaoke bar on the other. Endlessly fascinating to anyone working in theatre, the technique turns the actor into a living, breathing version of a puppet, channeling or transmitting the work of an other. If you know your theatre theory you know that the transcendent eloquence of puppets is in no way to be underestimated. As Kleist put it in an influential essay, On the Marionette Theatre, puppets have the advantage of being entirely free, in their expressive movements, of affectation. This is often the effect of the performances the Woosters put on— in their tight focus on the strictly technical challenge of hitting their marks at the right time, the actors reveal themselves more completely.

I always respond to the Wooster’s experiments with this approach to performance, but never quite so much as in the B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” a Record Album Interpretation, which ran at REDCAT in early February. B-Sidewas conceived by the performer Eric Berryman, directed by Kate Valk and it features Berryman, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore. I saw the piece on a Friday night, and was back for the Sunday matinee to see it again.