‘It’s a enjoyable cocktail!’: the Wooster Group’s head-spinning mix of excessive and low artwork | Stage

Spalding Gray used to carry out a present referred to as Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met within the foyer to affix him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one efficiency, a visitor broke the viewers’s hearts by speaking about her daughter’s homicide. At profit nights, folks dwelling with HIV shared their tales. Other instances, the anecdotes could be eccentric or amusing. Gray stated they confirmed us “what it is to live in the world”.

Watching Gray conjure up this materials made a giant impression on a younger actor referred to as Scott Shepherd. It was the present he noticed on his first go to to the Performing Garage, the New York dwelling of the Wooster Group. The pioneering avant garde firm had been established just a few years earlier by Gray and director Elizabeth LeCompte with their colleagues Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith.

“Interviewing the Audience was quite amazing,” says Shepherd. “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 from that into the person’s inner being. It was one of the great early theatre experiences of my life.”

By this time, Valk had had an equally transformative expertise on the Performing Garage, a theatre so small there was no room for a lobby and a few seats have been accessible solely by climbing a ladder. As an inquisitive appearing scholar, she had headed alongside to the SoHo venue to see Spalding Gray in two autobiographical items, Sakonnet Point (1975) and Rumstick Road (1977). She was hooked.

“I gave up my apartment and moved in upstairs,” Valk says, becoming a member of Shepherd on our video name. “It was such an amazing group of artists. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to give up everything and move in here because this is the place to be.’”

Valk turned a part of the Wooster Group in 1979, initially working as a seamstress and shortly as an actor. She has not often labored outdoors the corporate since: “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Now, in a type of posthumous tribute, each actors are returning to the position Gray created in Nayatt School (1978). This was the piece that adopted Sakonnet Point and Rumstick Road within the Rhode Island trilogy and was Gray’s first foray into autobiographical monologues, a forerunner to items resembling Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box.

Coming to London’s Coronet theatre, Nayatt School Redux shouldn’t be precisely a revival, however a reimagining of the 1978 present in a really Wooster Group means. “When we go back to look at the old work, it’s not like an artist can pull out her old painting from the warehouse and look at it,” says LeCompte, who lived with Gray within the Seventies. “We can’t do that. We only have very deteriorated, black-and-white material to work from.”

Where Gray – who died in 2004 – was as soon as a pal and colleague, he’s now a personality in a play a few play he made. “We’re getting as close to channelling his performance in Nayatt School as we can,” says Valk. “I’m the survivor, because I’m still in the group. I knew him, I worked with him, I was young, now I’m old and I’m the person who’s translating and telling you what he did. My monologue is like a palimpsest across the top of Spalding.”

“It’s another act of channelling or ventriloquism,” says Shepherd, recalling the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2005) through which he mimicked an archive recording of Richard Burton. “It’s even more literal this time, because I’m wearing some of the clothes that Spalding wore when he did the show. It does feel a bit seancey.”

Taking its title from a college in Barrington, Rhode Island, the place Gray grew up, Nayatt School had all of LeCompte’s celebrated hallmarks. Foremost amongst these was the collage-like juxtaposition of disparate components. The manufacturing blended vaudeville-style radio skits with TS Eliot’s postwar play The Cocktail Party, itself a curious mixture of drawing-room comedy and esoteric spiritual debate.

Eliot’s play fascinated Gray not solely as a result of he owned a forged recording that includes Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, but in addition as a result of one among its characters, Celia Coplestone, goes on a non secular journey that ends in her martyrdom. It reminded him of his mom, a Christian Scientist, who killed herself when he was 26. (Gray himself is assumed to have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry to his loss of life.)

The fusion of popular culture and excessive artwork has characterised the Wooster Group’s work. In 1984, LSD (Just the High Points) sat on the assembly level of Timothy Leary’s countercultural drug taking and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In 1988, Frank Dell’s the Temptation of St Antony mixed Gustave Flaubert with Lenny Bruce. And 1997’s House/Lights was half-Gertrude Stein and half-sexploitation flick.

The firm has cast sudden connections between baroque opera and sci-fi B-movies, Noh theatre and Chekhov. For LeCompte, who educated in portray and pictures, such head-spinning collisions are the way in which she sees the world. “I grew up with the television and art, and they do that all the time,” she says. “You can go from the most serious soap-opera scene to a toothpaste ad. As a kid, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re in the bathroom and they’re going to come out of the bathroom and continue the scene.’ I didn’t see that you needed to connect those things in any rational way.”

She compares her approach to frottage, the creative observe pioneered by Max Ernst through which pencil rubbings are taken from tough surfaces to create one thing new. “That’s what I do with the texts and the people,” says LeCompte, rubbing her fingers to exhibit. “The performers are material and I like to rub myself up against them.”

“Not in the literal sense,” she provides, rapidly, with amusing.

The impact may be discombobulating. It can be humorous. “It seems to be fun when it’s high/low,” says Valk. “For instance, this difficult writing by Gertrude Stein juxtaposed with a girl gang from a 60s B-movie. It’s a fun mix, like a cocktail. Sometimes, it’s not logical or reasonable, but you put the source material and the text so they’re vibrating against each other and then they somehow grow together.”

Shepherd provides: “The high and low combination has a double benefit. It takes the high thing down off its pedestal and you can appreciate an earthier humanity that’s encoded in there. And on the flip side, something sublime is exposed in the low thing.”

Getting these combos to work may be troublesome, however as soon as LeCompte has set her course, she by no means abandons an concept. Shepherd offers the instance of Vieux Carré (2008), through which they took a play by Tennessee Williams and layered it on to Paul Morrissey’s movies from Andy Warhol’s Factory. “We wanted to get the tone of realism from those movies on to this Tennessee Williams text,” he says. “We had to try and abandon different parts of the films because they didn’t work with the scene. It took us a while to get the right parts. Sometimes we know it’s not working, but not at the level of the whole project falling apart.”

The matching of reside actors to recorded movie and audio requires self-discipline. Even if a Wooster Group efficiency leaves you bewildered, you by no means lose admiration for the precision of the actors and technicians. “As performers, Scott, myself and Ari Fliakos – the whole middle period of the Wooster Group – have an athlete spirit,” says Valk. “With the copying, the speed, the deftness and the technical skills to follow and respond physically, there is a feat that needs to be accomplished. All three of us enjoy that.”

It is entertaining for audiences too, and if any of this sounds highfalutin, it’s to underestimate LeCompte’s sense of pleasure and surprise. She is much less the austere auteur than the fanatic, delighted on the absurdities of life and artwork. When Valk refers back to the firm’s “career”, LeCompte raises her eyebrows, adopts an expression of cartoon horror and attracts scare quotes within the air. Imagine calling it a profession! Heading for 82 and looking out a long time youthful, she retains her sense of enjoyment and mischief. She flashes one other broad smile and heads off to rehearsal.

Nayatt School Redux is at Coronet theatre, London, 17–25 April