The Times Quotidian

North Atlantic, Wooster Group at REDCAT, February 10–21, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

[View with PicLens]

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

Agreed.
Wooster Group’s Sci-Fi mashup of Cavalli opera La Didone offered little sense of transcendental satisfaction for the die hard opera lover (of which I am one!). And really the whole conflation felt gratuitous. But as sheer entertainment…I had a great time!

First off RedCat feels the perfect spot for this kind of hyperactive performance. Wooster really makes the most of all the technology available. The sound is amped and so are the cast, ready at any moment to take one for team Wooster. Probably my favorite performance was Scott Shepard as sir Piggy. He ran around snorting and grunting executing one prat fall after another, all the while clinging to his ukulele. When at last he is shot down, he belly flops onto a table hard-on side up. Very Conanesque. Lots of redheads in this troop!

Speaking of which, I found redhead King Jarbas’s counter tenor not believable. When he does finally rest in his proper register you get an idea of his true tone, but straddling the heights just sounded scratchy to me. Dido and Aeneas carry the heft of the singing well, seemingly not distracted by their space counterparts. The music direction was superb with an every-once-in-a-while achievement of serendipity between space banter and opera phrasing.

I found myself pondering why those tables didn’t just roll off the stage, a lot. Probably not what LeCompte had in mind for take away experience. It did leave me hankering to re-listen to my first Dido experience, Jessye Norman. But that was in Paris at the Opéra Comique and for a committed opera devotee, that was Oooh La La Sublime. — Nancy Cantwell

La Didone
The Wooster Group
Redcat Theater, Los Angeles, June 6 through June 21
by  Rita Valencia

Open on a post industrial-style stage and a lush, restless soundscape of way-distorted noise levels with smooth pulsing undercurrents of Baroque chamber opera. The sensual meets cold steel, curvy bods are clad in nicely shaped silver bodysuits. The overall effect has some charms, but like most things that charm, there is a vacuous center. In the case of “La Didone”, a 1641 Baroque opera by Francesco Cavalli, you might argue that the voiding of content began in a palliated retelling of the Dido/Aeneas romance when adapted for Carnival by librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello. In that opera, the tragic fate of Dido, the beautiful spurned suicide queen, was altered, so that Dido doesn’t kill herself after Aeneas has seduced and abandoned her. Instead she is brought back from the brink by horny King Iarbas –why let a good hot, propertied, babe go to waste when she can be eminently re-cycled? …the raunchy pragmatism of the times had its demands. Changing the end may have been an inane idea, pandering to the tastes of its audience, but not nearly half as ill concieved as marrying the whole opera to a sampling of 20th century space age kitsch: Planet of the Vampires, Terrore nello spazio, 1965 film by Mario Bava. with some additional material from Queen of Outer Space by Edward Bernds.

The Wooster Group and their brilliant impresario, Elizabeth LeCompte, by their own admission, were not eager to take on this project. “On a whim” they accepted the commission, from the Belgian KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, only after being “pestered” and because the budget was ample to hire real musicians. LeCompte’s interest in the nascent musicality of theater voicing was given some wind –“I always direct opera”. And so the group began by playing the movie and singing the opera side by side, then continuing to work and to stage and refine, until the piece took form. Check out this edifying set of interviews with LeCompte, Chinn and others from the group .

Hear an excerpt from this interview with LeCompte, Shepard and Chinn conducted by Claudia La Rocco

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The methodology of the Wooster Group, a long rehearsal process where a performance organically develops through inhabiting the premise, is always a large part of what the work is about. “Possession, being possessed by genre, the opera story getting taken over by the spirit of the movie…became a useful metaphor for the combining of the forms” said veteran Wooster member Scott Shepard. Evidently the pairing of this particular film to this opera was at the suggestion of film buff Dennis Dermody, a true lover and scholar of B Movies. LeCompte had originally been attracted to the notion of pairing the opera with a spaghetti Western, because the dubbing as a form of mask bore an interesting similarity to the use of voice as mask in the form of opera. It was odd to hear her say this, as I’d commented to my husband on the way home from the performance that La Didone would have worked better had it been juxtaposed (assuming you accept juxtaposition as a strategy at all) with a Spaghetti Western. In the genre of the Spaghetti western–in addition to the dubbing which lends a curious artificiality, there is the latent tragedy of the existential lonely drifter which gives a pungence to any romance. In “Terrore…” there is none of that, only the flat stylization of that Trekkie kind of film which the Bava represents: basically a cold war drama dealing with notions of paranoid xenophobia. Opera plus movie, tangentially related by the ideas of long lonely voyages, shipwreck and the alien invasion of love or something, is a playful and anomalous juxtaposition that never really gels into poetry. Absent of a sense of darkness, which always lurks behind the successful art that engages kitsch–you end up with, well, pleasant confusion. You cannot ignore or elide the implications of the signs you throw.

Musically there’s plenty to enjoy with Hai-Ting Chinn’s powerfully expressive contralto and Bruce Odland’s inspired scoring…Chinn’s performance inhabited another world, along with the brilliant rising star turn of hunky hot Andrew Nolen. His falsetto was thrilling, even more so when he dropped it to reveal his native bass/baritone–this guy you expect to be a tenor, or a fashion model or eye candy on a daytime soap–not the charismatic presence he in fact was. Back in the day, (17th century) singing falsetto was a code for virility, sort of like sissy singing in the vernacular of soul music (think The Stylistics). Worked for me, at least with Nolen doing it, though of course it drew giggles from the audience, as the meaning has been long since supplanted (19th century) by comedy. He and Chinn paired with the truly inventive work of Music Director Odland are worth the price of admission. Kate Valk turned in a mesmerizing performance as the cool space woman Sanya, agingly beautiful and Viva-esque. Jennifer Griesbach’s choreography was disciplined and smart.

The current cutting edge theater vernacular–for those projects which have been supported by a substantial amount of institutional funding–ensures that there will be at least a modest amount of video gadgetry and image manipulation, so there is nothing in the Wooster Group production which is groundbreaking. The set design was just okay–leaning to the space age rather than the baroque. I’ve seen real transformations of the space at Redcat and this staging was weirdly claustrophobic and cluttered.

Overall, I suspect this is opera for an art audience who think that opera is hokey and square, so that to blend it with a 60’s kitsch B-film would appear to be cool, cutting edge and clever marketing, but…why?