he Wooster Group is the preeminent experimental theater company in New York. Or, well, that's what I've heard, but I'd never actually seen one of their productions. It's been a few years since they put something on in New York, so when their production of Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre was announced, I knew I wanted to check it out. So last night, I headed to the Baryshnikov Arts Center, took my wildly uncomfortable seat, looked around and thought, "Fuck. This does NOT look promising."
I like to think I have an open mind about all performance. But there's a certain brand of (usually highly praised) experimental theater that mashes up technology and stage-craft--film projections, distorted audio, and and anything goes stage design that typically leaves me really cold. It's Richard Foreman syndrome. I try to convince myself behind it, but I can never quite get there. So looking at several screens, a visible sound board manned by three people upstage, and two wheeled platforms covered in detritus, I prepared myself for a sonic assault on the senses and braced myself to be ready to try to understand anything.
My fears were and were not realized. After a cacophonous opening with two characters lipsynching to their own voices as things clanged and banged around them, the action settled into a highly stylized but surprisingly straightforward story of a young writer who leaves home to find himself in New Orleans and ends up in a flophouse full of characters that ultimately inspire his writing. Along the way he has to contend with discovering his own homosexuality. So basically, Tennessee ran out of ways to use the stories he gathered and wrote a stage memoir.
Vieux Carre isn't a terribly well respected Williams play, and the Wooster Group does actually do a really interesting reshuffle of the material, taking pieces in and out of context, bunching story lines, expanding and contracting others to showcase this as the story of one writer's process of self-discovery above all else. All the rest in its hyper-stylized insanity is just what he spies on and, in turn, creates, as a means to give meaning to the lives he drifts in and out of. Their kitchen sink approach lends to some fascinating moments. I wouldn't have thought having an Asian woman play the older black servant with a Valley Girl accent would be anything other than silly and potentially offensive, but it's remarkably effective, showing just how much the character's outward behavior is performed for the company she keeps. Video projections play a particularly significant role in the writer's sexual discoveries. He is filmed onstage and the images are overlapped on video screens with those of other men in ways that are hauntingly effective in evoking the strangeness of imagination and the confusion of desire.
But for everything that works, there's at least one element that doesn't. The two virile male characters who are secure in their opposing sexualities are played by the same actor, each time with a dildo strapped to the outside of his pants. The character who keeps hiding how sick he is literally sprays the stage with fake blood constantly to remind us how aware he is that no one is fooled by his attempts to claim to be anything other than consumptive. Each nicely played moment is followed by one of these where you're bashed over the head with increasingly obvious symbolism. You feel like at any point, someone might turn to you and ask, "Get it? Did you get it? Did you see what we just did?" It's wearying after awhile. And at over two hours with no intermission and staged in one of the least comfortable theaters in New York, I just wanted it to end much, much sooner than it did. Especially since the last half hour, where the writer decides whether or not to leave New Orleans (which, HELLO, we all know he does!) is barren of suspense and shifts focus to the least interesting story in the play, or at least in this version of the play.
I figured it would be a love it or hate it experience. What I didn't expect was to find so much to love and hate myself. In the end, there was too much good to hate it but too much bad to love it. I appreciate the ambition of the piece, but I felt like someone needed to be able to step in and do some thoughtful pruning--do we need those four TV's playing random shit for two hours? Can we strip out about 60% of the props without actually losing anything? Is the lipsynching affecting or just pretentious? Not every idea someone has needs to be thrown onstage. Someone should tell the Wooster Group. And then they can relay the message to Julie Taymor...nah. Her show's way beyond fixing.
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