The Wooster Group is a legendary experimental theatre innovator. When it was founded in 1978, Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe were in the group, together with Kate Valk, who shares her stories and participates with the current group in Nayatt School Redux.
Based around a black and white recording of the show in Amsterdam – without the sexually suggestive ending – and Gray’s record collection, it includes a part-perfornance of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, of which the 1950 recording, with Alec Guinness, is heard in part.
Nayatt School Redux is a very complex and farcical piece. It is set in an approximation of the original set of platform, tables, tent (just the frame remains). The perspex box with windows has long since gone, but Gray’s battered satchel of records remains.
It’s edgy stuff, dramatic, reflective and deranged. In the video, Gray holds court, telling us about the recording and participating as a demented doctor – poor quality audio necessitates Valk and current company member Scott Shepherd to fill in from a transcript and earpieces.
I read a review of the original production from The New York Times after seeing this, just to check if what we were seeing in the archive footage was real. It was. The only difference is that some of the characters in The Cocktail Party scenes were played by children.
Gestures, tone of voice, and staging are presented the same on the Coronet stage, just 48 years later. Of the three major performers in Nayatt School, Gray died by suicide in 2004; Ron Vawter died from a heart attack in 1994; and Libby Howes died last year, a survivor of psychiatric treatment, age 70.
The current company has Shepherd, Ari Fliakos and Maura Tierney ‘standing in’, speaking their lines, becoming them for a moment. As Gray and Howes perform a scene from The Cocktail Party on screen, we see it before us with Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, Suzzy Roche, and Omar Zubair joining the madness.
Why Nayatt School Redux is being (re)mounted now (other than to drum up interest in an upcoming DVD of the original production) isn’t clear – but a chance to see The Wooster Group shouldn’t be passed over.
They are pioneers of absurdity, rearranging classic texts and leading the avant-garde scene from their base at The Performing Garage in SoHo.
To hear Kate Valk talk about the show, the group (where everyone was equal, listed as ‘construction’), and about Gray, is worth the price of admission. The sound and original music by Eric Sluyter & Omar Zubair adds another layer to proceedings.
It’s a curious evening, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte – another Wooster co-founder –Â but for all its weirdness, it feels a privilege to be there.
3 and a half stars.
The Wooster Group: Nayatt School Redux is running at the Coronet Theatre until 25 Apr.
Photo credit: Spencer Ostrander / Gianmarco Bresadola