A Global Exploration:
Eugene O'Neill in the 21st Century
Features
The Associated Press
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February 25, 2009
Festival considers O'Neill in the 21st century
By F.N. D'Alessio
CHICAGO (AP)—For someone who was written off as passe long before he died in 1953, Eugene O'Neill still has an uncanny ability to grab headlines and spark debate among theater critics.
Robert Falls—artistic director of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and known as an O'Neill specialist—has an appreciation for that ability and used it to assemble a two-month festival aimed at bringing America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist back to center stage.
"O'Neill is frankly my favorite writer," Falls said in a recent interview. "Here's an author who was very much formed in the 19th century and defined American drama in the 20th century. I wanted to see if these plays are still relevant in the 21st century.
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Desire Under the Elms
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The New York Times
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February 4, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
A New Look at an Old Farm Threatened by Heat
By Charles Isherwood
CHICAGO—A long, heated gaze between stepmother and stepson kindles a fatal conflagration in the major new revival of Eugene O�Neill�s Desire Under the Elms at the Goodman Theater here.
In the eyes of Eben Cabot, the young farmhand squirming under the thumb of his brutish father, there is little more than seething hate. The piercing look of Abbie Putnam, his father�s new bride, is hard too. But there are excitement, curiosity and a fierce hope of salvation in it as well. Time freezes; fate descends in all its awful majesty on a squalid kitchen in 19th-century New England; and a significant but mostly unloved drama by a great American playwright bursts into gripping, immediate life.
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Chicago Tribune
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January 27, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
An enormous, bold Desire Under the Elms at the Goodman
By Chris Jones
No ambiguous elms shelter the Cabot farmhouse in Robert Falls� colossal, eye-popping, unabashedly sexual and overtly expressionistic revival of Eugene O�Neill�s embryonic American tragedy from 1924. Falls and his designer, Walt Spangler, forge their operatic arena not from O�Neill�s description of the trees of New England, but, it seems, from his description of the guttural old guy who runs this hardscrabble place, beds its young women and ruins the promise of its sons.
"His face is as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder," O�Neill wrote of Ephraim Cabot, played here by that old Falls muse Brian Dennehy, "yet there is a weakness in it, a petty pride in its own narrow strength." The astounding sight that greets you as the burlap-like curtain rises at the Goodman is that characterization, externalized and writ large.
Writ enormous.
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Chicago Sun-Times
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January 27, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
Goodman's Desire a blistering, powerful exploration of O�Neill
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
By Hedy Weiss
Realism it most certainly is not. But with his grandly operatic production of Desire Under the Elms—the centerpiece of the Goodman Theatre�s multi-faceted exploration of the work of Eugene O�Neill—director Robert Falls has given us a founding myth of the American family written in the most gargantuan terms. Think O�Neill on steroids.
Let the tragedians of ancient Greece revel in their House of Thebes, with all its bloody murders and infanticides, its jealousies and rages, its private lusts, public power plays and bloody sacrifices. For O�Neill, a boulder-strewn New England farm was royal house enough. And the ferocious fight to inherit that farm, and the house that stands on it, is enough to unleash the most destructive passions.
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Variety
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January 26, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
By Steven Oxman
There are sets, and then there are sets. For the Goodman Theater's intense and emotionally still-evolving, Broadway-bound production of Eugene O'Neill's 1924 tragedy, Desire Under the Elms, helmer Robert Falls and designer Walt Spangler have delivered a set to behold—daring, imposing, acutely provocative and probably purposefully perplexing. Not at all an abstract version of O'Neill's own vision of an 1850 Connecticut farm and farmhouse, Spangler's creation reflects almost a direct counterpoint to it. When, as frequently occurs, characters look out at the sunset over this landscape and declare it "purty," there's a clearly intentional dissonance. It most certainly is not purty.
It's not an easy thing for actors to stand up to this brash set, but the cast here, led by an ideal Brian Dennehy, adds its own degree of big-ness and boldness. There may be no elms, but there's a whole lot of desire.
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Time Out Chicago
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January 27, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
By Christopher Piatt
When Desire Under the Elms moved to Broadway in 1924, out of a modest fringe production at the playwright�s home company, the Provincetown Players, it had the good fortune to be targeted by an uptight district attorney�s public campaign to clean up the Rialto. Deemed by D.A. Joab Banton to be "too thoroughly bad to be purified by a blue pencil," the struggling little 19th-century farm melodrama saw an immediate box-office jolt. Never the optimist, author Eugene O�Neill greeted the success skeptically; he didn�t want his play attracting the wrong crowds for the wrong reasons.
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Crain's Chicago Business
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January 26, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Raves for Goodman's Desire
By Shia Kapos
Chicago's theater community was buzzing last night with the opening of the Goodman Theatre's Desire Under the Elms, starring Tony Award winner Brian Dennehy, Carla "Entourage" Gugino and Pablo "The Wire" Schreiber.
Eugene O'Neill's version of a Greek tragedy had women wiping their eyes and men shaking their heads at the bitter family feud over land, love and inheritance. It's set in the 1920s but it's really a story that could be told today. The subject is deep, but at 1 hour and 40 minutes with no intermission, the audience was easily hooked by the tale.
"It was just wonderful. A great production," said Mr. O'Neill's granddaughter, Sheila O'Neill, who flew in from Maine to attend Monday night's show—one of the grandest opening nights the Goodman has seen in years.
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NewCity
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January 27, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms: Recommended
By Fabrizio O. Almeida
Let�s get right to the point. Robert Falls� production of Eugene O�Neill�s Desire under the Elms exceeds all expectations. And although I cannot quite declare it �the theatrical event of the year�—there are, after all, eleven months remaining—I will concede that this exceptional revival, showcasing a director and design team working at the top of their game, and boasting three mesmerizing performances at its core, is currently the best thing on a Chicago stage and deserves a place on every critic�s �Best Of� list twelve months from now.
Desire under the Elms, one of the playwright�s earlier works, is set on a rural New England farm in the mid-nineteenth century. O�Neill stage vet and Chicago adopted son Brian Dennehy plays septuagenarian Ephraim Cabot, a proud paterfamilias whose third marriage, to a wife thirty years his junior (Carla Gugino), threatens to deprive his embittered son Eben (Pablo Schreiber) of what he believes is his rightful inheritance: the family farm that bore witness to Cabot�s tyrannical younger years and the subsequent deaths of his first two wives (one of them Eben�s mother). From there on, Desire charts the greed, ambition and murderous passions that drive this father-son-stepmother saga through its Greek-tragedy-inspired twists and Freudian turns.
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Decider Chicago
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January 27, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Stage Review: Desire Under the Elms at the Goodman Theatre
Grade: A
By Rob Kozlowski
Donning a gloriously insidious unibrow, Brian Dennehy returns to the Goodman stage for the seventh time in 23 years—and kicked some serious ass for the seventh time in 23 years. He stars in Eugene O�Neill�s classic tragedy Desire Under The Elms, about aged patriarch Ephraim Cabot, and the young wife Abbie he brings home, only to have her fall for his son Eben. Their love results in a baby that Ephraim is led to believe is his, and naturally, grand tragedy ensues.
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Chicago Reader
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January 29, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Rocks and Hard Places
Robert Falls puts a treeless twist on Desire Under the Elms.
By Kerry Reid
In The Long Voyage Home, one of Eugene O�Neill�s early sea plays, a hard-luck Swedish sailor named Olson tells a prostitute, in broken English, "I want to go home this time. I feel homesick for farm and to see my people again. Just like little boy, I feel homesick."
A quick sojourn at the Cabot farm, scene of O�Neill�s Desire Under the Elms, would probably cure Olson of his nostalgia for things bucolic�especially as it�s depicted in Robert Falls�s boldly conceived production, the centerpiece of the Goodman Theatre�s three-month festival, A Global Exploration: Eugene O�Neill in the 21st Century.
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Northwest Indiana Times
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January 28, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Director Robert Falls and Brian Dennehy create compelling Desire Under the Elms
By Philip Potempa
The first time I ever watched actor Brian Dennehy on stage was in 1990, while I was still a student taking a theater class at Valparaiso University.
Professor John Steven Paul took my History of Theater class on a field trip to Chicago to the Goodman Theatre's "old" location for the rare opportunity of seeing Dennehy star as the lead in The Iceman Cometh, the classic written by Eugene O'Neill in 1939.
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Entertainment Weekly
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February 4, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Stage Review: Desire Under the Elms
A-
By Karen Leigh
Director Robert Falls' innovative staging of Desire Under the Elms, a 1924 drama about a family of squabbling farmers, isn't your typical Eugene O'Neill. There's bathtub nudity, sex on a kitchen table, and a looming, airborne house set more befitting the witches of Wicked.
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Windy City Times
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February 4, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Love it or hate it, you'll walk out of director Robert Falls' Desire Under the Elms with strong impressions and vivid, monumental visual pictures planted in your memory. Cutting substantial portions of text (and secondary characters), Falls condenses Eugene O'Neill's three-act tragedy into 100 minutes without intermission, frequently reducing language to mere background for the work's primordial sensuality and physicality. Extended portions of the play are acted wordlessly to music tracks ranging from Bob Dylan to Richard Woodbury's taught, piercing original soundscape. Falls' vision—and that of his superb design team—is a distant galaxy from the realistic, representational play O'Neill wrote, but nonetheless taps deeply into elemental Old Testament and Greek mythologies from which O'Neill drew inspiration. Perhaps no sources record sweaty, cataclysmic sexual passion—and its consequences—better than Scripture and the Greeks!
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Chicago Free Press
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February 4, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Desire Under the Elms
By Lawrence Bommer
Desire Under The Elms, Eugene O�Neill�s turgid 1924 potboiler, is set in a New England farm in 1850 where a neo-Biblical father and son fight it out for predominance, sexual and proprietary. In this appropriately outsized Goodman Theatre revival their sordid struggle leads to a thrilling end.
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The New York Times
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January 28, 2009
Does Broadway Desire an Elms Revival?
By Patrick Healy
In spite of a heaping load of Broadway projects on his plate, the producer Jeffrey Richards said on Tuesday that he was hoping to transfer a major new production to New York—a revival of the Eugene O�Neill classic Desire Under the Elms—despite the grim economic prospects for theater this year.
The O�Neill production opened on Monday night at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, directed by Robert Falls and starring Brian Dennehy as the tyrannical patriarch Ephraim Cabot. Mr. Dennehy�s two Tony Awards have come in productions directed by Mr. Falls that originated at the Goodman—Arthur Miller�s Death of a Salesman and O�Neill�s Long Day�s Journey into Night.
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The Wooster Group's performance of
The Emperor Jones
Chicago Production Press
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New York Production Press
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Chicago Tribune
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January 7, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Blackface and a revelatory Emperor Jones
By Chris Jones
Eugene O'Neill wasn't the only 20th Century American playwright to be afflicted by the scourge of racism. He was just the best of them. And thus The Emperor Jones presents a conundrum.
On one hand, this 1920 one-act play is a brilliant piece of expressionistic drama and an unstinting—and weirdly timeless—exploration of the unshakable nature of personal history and how the exploited turn into exploiters with particular and discomforting ease. On the other, O'Neill's story of Brutus Jones, train conductor turned despotic ruler of a West Indian island, is an conspicuous example of ignorant stereotyping that would be eschewed and forgotten, had its author not gone on to pen some of the greatest American dramas of the last century.
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Chicago Tribune to read the full article.
Chicago Sun-Times
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January 9, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | 'Emperor' of error
Blackface take on tale is unintelligible
By Hedy Weiss
The stated aim of the Goodman Theatre's current festival, Global Exploration: Eugene O'Neill in the 21st Century, is to give audiences a taste of how the work of O'Neill, that founding father of American playwrights, is being reimagined in contemporary theaters throughout the world. An intriguing concept, to be sure. But there is an inherent problem: While audiences might be familiar with a few of O'Neill's most widely produced plays (Long Day's Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, The Iceman Cometh), they often are starting from scratch with most of the others. So it is difficult to understand what has "changed" when you don't know what was there to start with.
A case in point is the largely unintelligible take on The Emperor Jones by New York's Wooster Group that opened here Wednesday and is the initial salvo in the O'Neill festival. Those who have never seen this rarely revived play (and who believe it should not be necessary to read a program insert to figure out what is going on) wouldn't have a clue about either the original meaning or its transformation here.
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Chicago Sun-Times to read the full article.
NewCity
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January 9, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Emperor Jones/Goodman Theatre
Recommended
By Monica Westin
An epiphany. Elizabeth LeCompte's daring adaptation, using conventions of blackface, of what was possibly Eugene O'Neill's most controversial play to begin with, balances the Wooster Group's spectacular aesthetic and fever pitch of the writing with delicate controlled performances on the brink of pure abstraction. The show is impeccably stylized at every level as it creates and destroys the legend/fantasy of Brutus Jones, running away from natives on an island he's colonized and his own past as a Pullman porter and convicted criminal in America, stuck on island he can't escape and that eventually annihilates him. Kate Valk's obvious masquerade as Jones, in the makeup of minstrelry, which does nothing to disguise its artificiality, and throwing her voice disturbingly convincingly as a white fantasy of black masculinity, doesn't let us forget for a moment that this kind of racial identification is a simulacrum and simultaneously a role that cannot be escaped. Artaud-like, the images of our own inherited stereotypes and our position as voyeurs into others' horrors are thrown in the audience's faces; in perhaps the most chilling moment of the show, Jones wakes up from a nightmare in the jungle and shrieks, "What are you looking at me for?" That Valk is utterly astonishing, even genius, comes as no surprise, but Scott Shepherd, the white British interlocutor for Jones' monologues, who serves as s sort of voice of history or colonialism itself, provides a dynamic anchor and an uncanny contrast for Valk's hysteric self-destruction. Technically just as brilliant, with a minimalist soundscape and stark, alienating visuals.
Chicago Critic
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January 7, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Groundbreaking theatrical event opens the Goodman's Eugene O'Neill festival
Recommended
By Tom Williams
The Wooster Group's controversial production of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 one act, The Emperor Jones, now at the Goodman Theatre for a short run, is an expressionistic and truly astonishing theatrical experience. This play will either leave you thoroughly disgusted and totally offended or it will be a most memorable theatrical experience. I had ambivalent feeling about this show. I was mesmerized by the sheer bravery of Kate Valk's intoxicating performance. Valk dons blackface and she sports a black dialect reminiscent of Amos & Andy as she plays a black man. O'Neill's constant use of the "N" word and his stereotypical portrait of a self destructive black man give this 1920 work a strong racist tint. I believe the director Elizabeth Lecompte's use of a white female to play Brutus Jones is a bold choice that serves the unique style of The Wooster Group. Since the Jones character is a negative, self loathing soul better a female in black face play him than an uncomfortable black man.
This two character play finds Brutus Jones, a self-appointed emperor of a West Indian island, after he leaves the USA where he worked as a Pullman porter. Jones debates the exploitation of the natives with an English trader, Smithers (Scott Shepherd) by playing on the natives' superstitions. Much of the hour long one act is hard to understand since Kate Valk sports black dialect and Smithers drones on with a thick cockney accent. The production elements filter the story into comprehension.
What makes this work unique is the provocative production style including radical staging, use of live video, film, multi-track scoring with techno music together with suggestive costumes infused dance and Kabuki-like movements. The lighting and sound effects add depth to visceral expression that heightened the emotional impact of the piece. The work features a series of monologues from the Jones character many of which are performed with vocal intonations reminiscent of the minstrel shows of the 19th Century. Kate Valk's stunning performance complete with rolling eyes, wild laughter and a mocking tone together with her exuding raw fear and trepidation ultimately win our empathy. Valk is a wonder to witness on stage. The ambitious staging is compelling. While The Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones may not be for everyone especially for those racially sensitive, it is a must see for those who want their theatre to challenge them and take them into new horizons. The work from Kate Valk is breathtaking.
Chicago Tribune Blog
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January 9, 2009
No sidewalk protests for Emperor Jones
By Doug George
There were no protests outside the Goodman Theatre Thursday night in response to The Wooster Group's staging of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones, which features white actress Kate Valk performing the title role in blackface.
Before its opening on Wednesday, the African-American publisher Third World Press of Chicago had called for a boycott, and a story in Thursday's Sun-Times was followed by anonymous phone calls to the theater saying there would be protests.
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Chicago Tribune Blog
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January 7, 2009
Third World Press advocates Goodman blackface boycott
By Chris Jones
The Chicago-based Third World Press has been contacting reporters today protesting the use of blackface in The Wooster Group's famous and long-lived production of The Emperor Jones," which kicks off the Goodman Theatre's Eugene O'Neill Festival Wednesday night. "Merely days away from the inauguration of America's first black president," read the group's e-mailed flyer, "the world of theater has taken us back almost seventeen decades!"
The famous production, which was first seen in the early 1990s, features the white actress Kate Valk in the title role of the despotic train porter, which was originally written to be played by an African-American male. Most critics or this highly acclaimed production have argued that Elizabeth LeCompte's production is not an exploitation of blackface but a comment on multiple layers of racism and sexism. The 1920 play, a product of its era, was written in dialect.
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Los Angeles Times
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January 8, 2009
Blackface in the year of Obama
By Sherry Stern
The Chicago Tribune writes of Eugene O'Neill's play: On the one hand, this 1920 one-act is a brilliant piece of expressionistic drama and an unstinting—and weirdly timeless—exploration of how the exploited turn into exploiters with particular ease. On the other, O'Neill's story of Brutus Jones, train conductor turned despotic ruler of a West Indian island, is an odious example of ignorant stereotyping that would be eschewed and forgotten, had its author not gone on to pen some of the greatest American dramas of the twentieth century. Few black actors would want to play this odiously unplayable role today.
The Chicagoist website reports that The Emperor Jones opened last night at the Goodman Theatre to a sold-out crowd despite a protest by the Chicago publishing company and African American activist group, Third World Press.
Bennett Jones Johnson, vice president of Third World Press, told Chicagoist: "What we object to is the minstrelsy aspect, which we consider both an anachronism and an insult. Minstrelsy has the same emotional connotations as lynching."
The Goodman's executive producer Roche Schulfer said: "This Wooster Group production has been performed for 15 years at theaters around the world. And the overwhelming response to it is that it is not racist, but that it undermines racist and sexist stereotypes through the use of masks and Japanese theater techniques."
When the production was mounted in New York in 2006, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote that "it could be argued that the decision to cast a white woman in a role written for a black man is uniquely sensitive. It's hard to imagine a black actor playing the role today without causing discomfort, to himself or to the audience."
Isherwood called lead actress Kate Valk "riveting, haunting, altogether astonishing."
Chicago Sun-Times
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JANUARY 8, 2009
GOODMAN THEATRE | Drama, race collide at Goodman Theatre
Play 'virtually sold out' despite call for boycott because of blackface
By Hedy Weiss
A play at the Goodman Theatre that features a white actress in blackface is sparking controversy.
Late Wednesday afternoon, hours before the opening of The Wooster Group production of Eugene O'Neill's play, The Emperor Jones, at the Goodman, Third World Press sent out e-mails asking for a boycott of the show. It also had asked for a boycott of a panel discussion scheduled earlier in the day at the Chicago Cultural Center titled "Performing Other: Constructing Race and Gender Onstage and Off."
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Chicago Sun-Times to read the full article.
Time Out Chicago
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January 8, 2009
5 minutes with Kate Valk
Sometime black man
By John Beer
New York performance troupe the Wooster Group—which spawned careers for Spalding Gray and Willem Defoe, among others—has always been in the controversial avant-garde. But few of its shows have caused the stir drummed up by the company's famous staging of The Emperor Jones, Eugene O'Neill's 1920 expressionistic play about an escaped con who takes over a Caribbean island. That's because its titular character, a black man, is played by white woman Kate Valk. Her legendary performance gets revived this week in the Goodman Theatre's O'Neill festival.
As a white woman, how do you approach playing Brutus Jones, a black man?
The voice of Brutus Jones is all there on the page for me. That character has been in my life since I was a girl: I saw a ballet version of The Emperor Jones, and I was just awestruck. And then Paul Robeson [who played Jones to acclaim on stage in 1924 and on screen in 1933]: He's as big for me as Gertrude Stein, one of the people who shows that anything and everything is possible. The first performing I did with [Wooster Group cofounder] Liz [LeCompte] was a re-creation of [the black vaudeville] Pigmeat Markham routine, in blackface, dealing with minstrelsy. I'm usually careful to say it's a black mask, because it's not straight-up minstrelsy. For me, it was about passing, about passing for black.
It's interesting how minstrelsy haunts performing arts. Think about Amos 'n' Andy, which originated in Chicago: It was this enormously influential and popular thing, and now it's as though it's vanished, but not really.
I've read some about the history; I'm not a scholar. But there are some very interesting books about the history of minstrelsy. It really gives you an idea of the history of playing the other. [Minstrelsy is] something that's been repressed. It's like we closed the door on that, and that can't happen, or it never happened, or it's so horrifyingly bad you can't look at it. But The Emperor Jones is something that we came to for the love of the character, the story, and Eugene O'Neill's language. We didn't do it because we had something over here we wanted to say about race. We did it because we had to.
What's the process of rehearsing the piece?
For me, I have to get my Jones on, you know? The biggest thing for me is I'm playing a man. So I have to contact a certain kind of energy, which does not happen overnight. You might see me jogging in the freezing cold. I have to get a certain kind of almost athletic energy. It's mostly vocally demanding, but I'm feeling pretty good.
NewCity
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December 23, 2008
Valk Like a Man: The Wooster Group's Kate Valk discusses
Eugene O'Neill's controversial classic, The Emperor Jones
By Valerie Jean Johnson
It was 1920 when Eugene O'Neill was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Horizon, forecasting his place in theater history as one of America's most important playwrights. Nearly a hundred years later, Chicago's Goodman Theatre honors and examines the legacy of the "father of American drama" with A GLOBAL EXPLORATION: Eugene O'Neill in the 21st Century, a three-month festival (curated by Artistic Director Robert Falls) showcasing productions by some of today's most innovative and exciting theater companies. At the top of the lineup is the New York City-based Wooster Group, itself a legend of the contemporary American stage, presenting their groundbreaking interpretation of The Emperor Jones.
For over three decades, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the company has been constructing its powerfully unique multimedia performances, including radical reworkings of plays by some of the most lauded playwrights of the historical and contemporary canon: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill. Their highly stylized productions have earned critical acclaim and drawn passionate controversy, perhaps none more so than Jones, the rarely produced, controversial, expressionistic tale of Brutus Jones, the tyrannical emperor of an island in the West Indies, on the run from natives in revolt, haunted by the ghosts of both his criminal past and the scars of America's nefarious racial history. The nucleus of the Group's explosive production, which premiered in 1993, is Kate Valk, a white woman who takes the stage with her face caked in thick black makeup, assuming the title role. It is a performance that has been praised by critics as "riveting, haunting and altogether astonishing," a "tour de force" that has challenged racial and gender stereotypes while dazzling, disturbing and defying expectations of audiences around the globe.
Valk's relationship with O'Neill's play goes back to her childhood: "I certainly grew up with [it]...Paul Robeson [the stage and screen legend who played Jones in the 1924 revival] was one of my idols and I had seen the film...I had even, as a young girl, seen a ballet version of The Emperor Jones so I certainly knew about it, although I hadn't ever read the actual play." It wasn't until much later that Valk encountered the play on the page, when LeCompte presented the idea of producing the play to the Group. "When I first started working with the company they were doing Port Judith, and Spalding's [Gray] party piece was kind of a mad dance� he and Liz had taken and edited a section from Long Day's Journey into Night, so O'Neill was around...we read [Jones], and she [LeCompte] thought that I could play it."
The Wooster Group's process draws from a variety of sources—music, film, traditional global theater practices, pop culture—and for this production, the company found a great deal of inspiration in the presentational style of Japanese Noh theater. "We began working with the text from O'Neill and the movement that we loved from the Asian theater forms—not that we studied it at all, it was more a kind of very modern, fast synthesis of all those materials, but it came very intuitively. And it's all there on the page, like music� It's written phonetically."
And on a first reading, O'Neill's writing style is nearly as startling in its appearance on the page as the story itself—the diction and language immediately and disturbingly evoke the ghosts of American minstrelsy characters. Confronted with the apparition of a prison guard he killed before fleeing to the island, Jones cries out to the dark walls of the surrounding forest "I kills you, you white debil, if it's de last thing I evah does! Ghost or debil, I kill you agin!" Valk's Brutus Jones is presented with such magnetic and unrelenting precision that each performance, she admits, is extremely exhausting, and preparing for each remount of the show is a challenge to both mind and body for this seasoned and accomplished actress. "I don't quite have the same energy I had when I was 35," Valk says with a chuckle, "but maybe there's something else I look for. I would say what I lose in youthful robustness I maybe make up for just by experience of all the other kind of performance I've done with Liz and the group since then. [The performance] takes a lot of energy and I was a little worried about that until� Scott [Shepard] and Ari [Fliakos], the people that I play with on stage, and I just watched the tape. I'm really looking forward to doing it again."
Those recordings of past performances are invaluable tools for the Group when remounting works from their thirty-plus year history. "We just watched the tape of the last time we performed it, in Philadelphia a little over a year ago. It's scored out, and it doesn't change radically in terms of structure. The singing of the song, of the text, my style, is still very much the same." But this tour of Jones will be the company's last, says Valk, explaining simply that "there are certain roles you play at certain times of your life."
But Valk seems more than pleased at the prospect of launching the first of the final performances here in Chicago, a fitting culmination of the fifteen-year journey of Jones. "It's an honor to be part of the O'Neill festival—are you kidding? To have the work seen in that context, I'm thrilled. To be considered part of the modern canon of O'Neill's work, I'm deeply honored."
The New York Times
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
THEATER REVIEW | 'THE EMPEROR JONES'
An Emperor Who Tops What O'Neill Imagined
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Back in the day, Sarah Bernhardt's performance in "La Dame aux Cam�lias" was spoken of with
reverence. Laurette Taylor in "The Glass Menagerie" was, for some still living, a high-water
mark of dramatic interpretation. Maria Callas's few "Toscas" at the Met are recalled by those
lucky enough to attend with similar wonderment, perfumed with pity, of course, for the hapless
many who never had the chance.
A performance of much more recent vintage has inspired similar effusions among a certain
subset of New York theatergoers. Mingling at an art opening or lounging in a club on the Lower
East Side, some among you may have been subjected to a harangue, delivered through a smug
fog of cigarette smoke, on the strange glory of Kate Valk in the Wooster Group's acclaimed
production of "The Emperor Jones," in the latter days of the last century.
Alas for these downtown hipsters and their velvet ropes, this performance has not conveniently
retreated into the V.I.P. room of theater legend, never to re-emerge. The Wooster Group
production of "Emperor Jones" is back onstage at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, and there, at
its center, is Ms. Valk again, riveting, haunting, altogether astonishing.
She is attired in tatterdemalion regalia befitting a legend-in-the-making, in a voluminous garment
that resembles a cheapo king's costume arrested in the process of swallowing a kimono. But the
oddity of this ensemble may take a while to register, since the most arresting aspect of Ms.
Valk's aspect is the thick, oily black makeup covering her entire face. The petite, Caucasian,
obviously female Ms. Valk is playing the title role, Brutus Jones, a venal black train porter
turned despot, in O'Neill's hypnotic play about the destructive impact of history on the shaping of
personality. And she is playing it in blackface.
This choice might seem, on the surface, to be a culturally insensitive stunt designed to stir
controversy, but it is fairly routine by the standards of the Wooster Group, the veteran theater
troupe known for taking a playfully freakish approach to theatrical texts. Indeed in this case it
could be argued that the decision to cast a white woman in a role written for a black man is
uniquely sensitive. It's hard to imagine a black actor playing the role today without causing
discomfort, to himself or to the audience.
In the character of Brutus, the two-bit tyrant of a West Indian island who flees a native uprising
and, lost in the woods, is gradually haunted to distraction and ultimately death by the ghosts of
his own sins and those of American history, O'Neill was not drawing a damning portrait of a
man, and certainly not prosecuting a race. "The Emperor Jones," one of O'Neill's first critical and
commercial successes, was an expressionistic evisceration of the history that shaped Brutus
Jones and bent his destiny, as it did that of too many black Americans, toward self-destruction.
But the language O'Neill used to create his ultimately compassionate portrait was inevitably
influenced by contemporary cultural depictions of African-Americans (the play had its premiere
in 1920), and it induces instant wincing today. In the opening scene, Brutus is roused from
afternoon slumber by the whistle of a sleazy white businessman, Smithers (played with slimedripping
guile by Scott Shepherd, who alternates in the role with Ari Fliakos). He storms onstage
and says: "Who dare whistle dat way in my palace? Who dare wake up de Emperor? I'll get de
hide frayled off some o' you niggers sho!" So it goes for most of the play's hourlong running
time, since "The Emperor Jones" is virtually a monologue for the character of Brutus, who is
onstage almost for its entirety.
Lest you assume that the blackfaced Ms. Valk is speaking a whitewashed version of the text, let
it be known that she articulates every "dem" and every "sho" in an uncannily precise imitation of
the singsongy vocal roulades of minstrelsy. The rummy baritone she employs for much of the
time can also rise to a falsetto hoot, and the performance also features such potentially squirmworthy
effects as absurd, guttural laughs and rolls of the eyes suggesting childish fright.
But we remain, at all times, powerfully aware that we are witnessing an actress fashioning, with
superb precision, a simulacrum of a stereotype. And this heightened awareness of Ms. Valk's
performance as an artificial construct shapes our perception of her character as a man spouting
words and attitudes that destiny has forced him to emit. We see Brutus Jones himself as an actor
helplessly playing a role written by the savage errors of American history.
The effect is enhanced by Ms. Valk's choreographed manipulation of the microphone she uses,
and the weird, hip-shaking soft shoe infused with Kabuki-like movements she performs with Mr. Shepherd between some scenes. These and other peculiar touches transform Brutus Jones into a
flailing doll being yanked toward destruction by unseen hands. That Ms. Valk is somehow able
to infuse this artfully outlandish performance with a poignant sense of entrapped humanity is
remarkable. In fact it's nothing short of sorcery.
But while Ms. Valk's performance may evoke twinges of real pathos, don't imagine that the
Wooster Group and the production's director, Elizabeth LeCompte, have suddenly gone
sentimental. The company's refractive approach to texts and its neo-Brechtian aesthetic are
aimed at the intellect, not the gut, which may be one reason that Wooster Group productions can
be more fully engaging when recollected in memory � or written about � than in performance.
There are, of course, pleasures to be derived from watching the company deploy with precision
its ample arsenal of technical effects. "The Emperor Jones" is actually lighter on mechanized
wizardry than many of the Wooster Group's shows, but Jennifer Tipton's burnishing lighting, Jim
Clayburgh's minimalist set, Christopher Kondek's video and David Linton's rhythmic synthesizer
score create a typically elegant visual and aural backdrop for the performance. That this
backdrop sometimes obscures or contradicts the specifics of O'Neill's text will bother some more
than others: Mr. Linton does not reproduce the accelerating, unceasing drumbeat O'Neill
dictated, for example.
But Ms. LeCompte and her collaborators do not so much interpret texts as converse with them �
even interrogate them. And if there are moments during a performance of "The Emperor Jones"
when you feel left out of the conversation, and find your mind fixating with irritation on a
particular peculiarity (why the darn fly swatters?), Ms. Valk's entrancing presence is guaranteed
to draw you back in. Playing a man falling prey to atavistic fear bred in his bones by centuries of
history, Ms. Valk performs with a fearlessness that commands something akin to awe.
The New Yorker
Top
March 27, 2006
The Empress Jones
The Wooster Group plays with race and gender in O�Neill�s early work.
By Hilton Als
Imagine this: Your mother is a junkie and your father is a broken-down actor. You are reared in
an atmosphere of deception and artifice. You have an older brother who, in an attempt to win
your father�s alternately hard and sentimental heart, tries to become an actor, too. What he lacks
in ambition he makes up for in bitterness, guilt, and drink. You write poetry that owes a great
deal to Baudelaire. You are drawn to the sea, which for a time, at least, allows you to cast off the
angry ghosts you call your family and whose tainted blood is your own. You leave home, first
for Central America, then for South America, first for one wife and then for another, and another.
There are children�testaments less to your urge to procreate than to your desire to establish a
model family that does not include your parents or your brother. Wives, children, security: each,
in the end, is a mere buoy in the great salt sea of your imagination.
Our country�s premier poet of the water, the New York-born playwright Eugene O�Neill (1888-
1953) confined a number of his doomed, anxious characters to boats and islands�relatively
small spaces that not only serve the dramatic tension that is a hallmark of his style but also lend a
mournful edge to his characters� monologues, the best of which sound like songs sung by
landlocked sailors. Equal to O�Neill�s fascination with the sea is his obsession with masks. He
uses them not just as props but as shields with which his characters defend the illusions they
have piled up in the effort to become themselves.
Race, too, can be a kind of mask. In the Wooster Group�s current production of O�Neill�s 1920
expressionistic �The Emperor Jones� (at St. Ann�s Warehouse), the astonishing Kate Valk plays
the title character��a tall, powerfully built, full-blooded negro of middle age��in blackface.
Formerly a Pullman porter, Brutus Jones travels to an unnamed island in the Caribbean as a
stowaway; he becomes the island�s �emperor� when some �bush niggers� see him dodge a bullet
in a showdown with another man�an escape that they attribute to his magical powers. In fact,
the power that Jones is most interested in is economic. To Smithers (who was played by the
brilliant Scott Shepherd on the night that I saw the show, and is also played by Ari Fliakos), a
cowardly colonialist who envies his success, Jones says, �Dere�s little stealin� like you does, and
dere�s big stealin� like I does.� He goes on:
For de little stealin� dey gets you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin� dey makes you Emperor
and puts you in de Hall o� Fame when you croaks. (Reminiscently) If dey�s one thing I learns in
ten years on de Pullman ca�s listenin� to de white quality talk, it�s dat same fact. And when I gits
a chance to use it I winds up Emperor in two years.
Created when segregation, not to mention lynching, was still in effect, Brutus Jones survives as a
black man by listening to �white quality talk� and learning to oppress blacks himself. On the
island, he is no longer the hunted; he�s a gatherer of prey.
Nowhere in the definitive 1962 biography �O�Neill� do the authors, Arthur and Barbara Gelb,
indicate that their subject was especially attuned to black life in America. (The most realistic
black character in O�Neill�s oeuvre is Joe Mott, in the 1939 play �The Iceman Cometh.�) But we
do know that O�Neill was particularly taken with the marginalized�with the detritus washed up
on the shores of the sea of life. This interest is what the director of �The Emperor Jones,�
Elizabeth LeCompte, focusses on here. By casting Valk in the title role, instead of, say, Jeffrey
Wright, she adds another dimension to the play: she equates the female with the black outsider,
and she allows Valk to embody the two central themes of American drama, sex and race. By
mercilessly exploiting language that the N.A.A.C.P. would find incendiary now�Valk speaks in
a different register as she pronounces the �de�s, �dem�s, and �dat�s that pepper Jones�s
speech�LeCompte also addresses the long-standing controversy surrounding the text. Charles
Gilpin was the first Brutus Jones, when the play premi�red, at the Playwrights� Theatre, in
Greenwich Village, in 1920. By all accounts, Gilpin was a gifted actor, but he drank. The titanic
Paul Robeson stepped into the role in 1924, as part of a package with O�Neill�s interracial,
bourgeois-minded drama �All God�s Chillun Got Wings.� Robeson was reportedly disturbed by
what he perceived as racism in �The Emperor Jones.� (W. E. B. Du Bois did not share his view;
he wrote, at the time, that O�Neill was �bursting through� black stereotypes onstage and giving
the audience �Negro blood.�) However, Robeson needed work, and roles for black actors were
scarce; his performance in New York and in a London production was likely one of those little
soul murders that many black actors must withstand if they�re to work at all. LeCompte doesn�t
comment on the racism of O�Neill�s language or ideas by underlining them with a strident moral
stance. Instead, in ways that are both brave and sweetly foolhardy, she makes it clear that Brutus
Jones is a white man�s idea of a Negro. Along the way, she wrests a great performance from
Valk, which is, in some sense, an homage to the many black actors before and since Robeson
who have had to perform �blackness� in order to be seen.
Replacing the costume that O�Neill proposed for Jones��light blue uniform coat, sprayed with
brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs, etc.��with
African-and Asian-inspired robes, LeCompte treats �The Emperor Jones� as a monologue of
sorts, excising entire passages from O�Neill�s text. Seated in a wheelchair, with microphone in
hand, and Smithers and two tiny palm trees behind her, Valk pays no attention to the technicians
who are onstage to her right, projecting images overhead. She talks and talks, barely shifting in
her chair. She conveys Jones�s rage, wit, and wiles mostly through her voice and her eyes, the whites of which are made all the whiter by the thick black makeup that coats her face like a
minstrel-show nightmare. From time to time, Valk stretches her red lips in an exaggerated
grimace. It�s a shock to see her at first. The full historical horror of her presentation is heightened
by Smithers�s snide voice (he�s the more �female� character here) and by the distant music and
electronic beeps that punctuate Jones�s speech�a stand-in for the drumbeats that pursue Jones as
he tries to escape across the island after hearing that the �natives� are planning an uprising
against him. In a sense, Valk plays Jones as a politician: her stentorian voice and posture recall
those advocates of ideology we once believed in. And her fate, like that of many of the
politicians who fail us, is decided at the hands of the people. When a red blotch is drawn across
Valk�s white shirtfront, the gesture speaks louder than all the words that have cascaded from her
mouth.
LeCompte�s condensed version of �The Emperor Jones,� which lasts a shattering sixty minutes,
acts as a kind of coda to the Wooster Group�s controversial 1981 show �Route 1 & 9.� In that
piece, most of the actors appeared in blackface and used routines that were made famous on the
chitlin� circuit as a jumping-off point for their improvisations (one of which involved ordering
from a fried-chicken takeout place). After the premi�re of �Route 1 & 9,� the National
Endowment for the Arts revoked the Wooster Group�s funding. And one can see why: the
Group�s audience is largely white. Were the actors making fun of blacks, or just crapping on the
artistically limited notion of political correctness? Watching video clips of that performance, one
misses the sad irony that LeCompte brings to this production. Here she poses the question:
Minstrel shows, avant-garde theatre, is there a difference? And can we not learn from both
elements of the American theatrical tradition? Just as the Playwrights� Theatre provided a home
for O�Neill�s early work, the Wooster Group provides a home for its contemporary
interpretation. In the end, their version of the work is not so different from O�Neill�s: they show
us the sea of deception and pretense we all swim in, while searching for the self that is waiting
there at the water�s edge, if only we could see it..
Time Out New York
Top
Issue 546 : Mar 16�22, 2006
The Emperor Jones
By Eugene O�Neill. Dir. Elizabeth LeCompte. With Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos.
St. Ann�s Warehouse
By David Cote
When I saw the Wooster Group�s first version of The Emperor Jones in 1993, I had to return to
the Performing Garage the next day to retrieve the lower half of my jaw from lost and found.
Let�s hope the staff at St. Ann�s Warehouse has a bigger box. In the years since that work-inprogress,
much has changed in the world. For one thing, you can tune into FX to see a white
family undergo a blackface makeover (and vice versa) so they can walk a mile in the other�s
shoes. But race won�t be demystified anytime soon, and nothing could prepare those realityshow
participants for the one-hour sensory assault of this masterpiece of multimedia theater.
In The Emperor Jones, Kate Valk plays a colored man, literally: She paints her face deepest
black, dons Japanese robes and wields a microphone-cum-scepter like a multicultural mutant.
Shucking and jiving through the Eugene O�Neill role, the performer exploits the tropes of
minstrelsy�puckering lips, rolling eyes, braying wide-mouthed laugh�while navigating an
audio-visual field that includes ear-pounding drum mixes and hypnotic video. While the layering
can bewilder, it becomes clear that Valk and director Elizabeth LeCompte are reinventing the
notion of stage blackness. Providing comical counterpoint is Scott Shepherd (and, on alternate
nights, Ari Fliakos) as Smithers, a Cockney crook following Jones�s progression from escaped
U.S. convict and West Indian dictator to deposed ruler hunted by his people. While it helps to
read O�Neill�s play beforehand, there is a useful synopsis in the program. The action isn�t hard to
follow, once your brain adjusts to LeCompte�s neuron-popping dramaturgy.
A CurtainUp Review
Top
The Emperor Jones
March 13, 2006
by Les Gutman
There is a lot about ruthless dictators that Eugene O'Neill could not have imagined in 1920 when
he wrote this play. And though one commonly thinks of The Emperor Jones as the particularized
story of an African-American pullman car porter who kills a man, goes to jail, kills a guard while
on a chain gang and then escapes to an island in the West Indies where he grifts his way to
power, The Wooster Group's production finesses that lesson and (to a large degree) the
offensiveness of the characterization, creating a decidedly Brechtian effect of uncommon
resonance.
I went to see The Wooster Group's return engagement of The Emperor Jones expecting to be
blown away by Kate Valk's tour de force performance in the title role. (I was, and I'll get back to
that shortly.) I was also curious about the play itself—complex and groundbreaking in more
ways than one can count, and described as both difficult to present to contemporary audiences
and yet the play with which "American theatre came of age" [Travis Bogard, Contours in Time].
And yes, it is all of those things.
Along the way, the show even manages to weigh in, serendipitously, on the very current question
of the risks theaters face in presenting work which is likely to touch a raw nerve or two. If the
play's history had a voice in this debate, it would probably say, "Go forth into the cauldron".
The Emperor Jones has been a controversy looking for a place to happen from the get-go. In its
original presentation in 1920, the Provincetown Players had the temerity to cast a black man
(Charles Gilpin) to play the black man who is the show's title character, hero and villain. (Prior
to that time, white actors routinely got the job, and performed in black face). The result was a
show that became the hottest ticket in town. (The production would later move uptown, and Paul
Robeson would become known when he took over for Gilpin.) In 1998, confronted by a seminal
play containing a negative stereotype of monumental proportions, The Wooster Group and its
director Elizabeth LeCompte chose to negotiate its own path through the minefield of political
correctness: they cast a white woman (Kate Valk) as The Emperor Brutus Jones, had her appear
in black face and, as if to further animate the construct, dressed her in a Kabuki-like outfit. In
1998 and no doubt for the current re-incarnation, audiences line up to see the show.
The Wooster Group version of Emperor follows O'Neill's script, though it truncates some of the
text. The cast has been reduced essentially to two, Jones and the Cockney trader, Smithers (Ari
Fliakos—played by Scott Shepherd at alternate performances). There is also a credited "stage
assistant" (performed by Shepherd and presumably Fliakos on alternate nights). During much of the play, Smithers is relegated to the edges of Jim Clayburgh's sideless-box set,
and the action of the play's six middle scenes (those depicting his journey through the forest,
during which he encounters visions—"haunts"—of his own life and history) are displayed
entirely on a video (by Christopher Kondek) at upstage center. Virtually everything happening
onstage is thus focused almost exclusively on Ms. Valk. To say that she commands the stage is
an understatement. Hers is a performance the likes of which most will never have experienced
before, and are not likely to encounter again. Her gutteral yet lyrical voice is punctuated by leaps
up the vocal range and down into a laugh that causes goosebumps; her eyes fly around the set
like birds; every motion in her body is calculated, timed, perfection.
There is no attempt at realism in this piece. The blank canvas set is occasionally augmented by a
prop—a wheelchair haphazardly covered in what looks like a loosely-knit "furry" sweater as the
throne, a single large potted plant as the forest. Ms. Valk is almost never without her microphone—usually attached to a long pole. Jennifer Tipton's lighting, much of it fluorescent, never evokes
the natural, though it increasingly possesses a sickly murkiness. Dances, which form interludes,
conjure up an invention we might call Japanese vaudeville.
As we have come to expect from The Wooster Group, every element of the production is
carefully hewn and intelligently considered. Voices, sound effects, lighting, video and movement
are calibrated with the precision of a watchmaker. My only quibble is that Mr. Kondek's videos
are projected on a monitor so small that it is impossible to appreciate what is happening in the
middle scenes. This is especially unfortunate for anyone who does not arrive knowing the play,
though a short summary of the eight scenes is included in the playbill, and a couple minutes
spent reading it will bring anyone up to speed.
The New Yorker
Top
Onward and Upward with the Arts
Experimental Journey
Elizabeth LeCompte takes on Shakespeare
by Jane Kramer
October 8, 2007
It was the top of the eighth on a drizzly night at Yankee Stadium�June 6, 2006. The Red Sox
were in town, and Elizabeth LeCompte, wrapped in a thin red parka and settled into a great seat,
in the seventh row, just to the right of home plate, was balancing a plastic cup of Courvoisier and
a greasy carton of ballpark pizza, and studying Joe Torre, a couple of feet away at the Yankee
dugout railing. LeCompte is a director, or, as she is often described, a �creator of theatre.� In
three weeks� time, her company, the Wooster Group, was scheduled to open in Barcelona with a
new �Hamlet� that, by her own admission, was �not quite there� (it starts previews at the Public
Theatre on October 9th), and LeCompte was wondering how Torre might handle the problem of
a video technician notably unconcerned by a stage-right video monitor that didn�t track and a
Polonius with a memory block. LeCompte thinks of Joe Torre as a mentor in composure, or, you
could say, a colleague in art. �I am not just a baseball fan; I am a Yankees fan and a Torre fan,�
she says. �I like winners, and the way Torre can keep a team together and make it shine, but he
doesn�t excuse anything when he loses. He says, �It was just one of those games�you go back
and forth in this business.� I wish I could be that way about a play.�
It looked like one of those games that night. There were two men out, and the Yankees held a
2�1 lead, but the redoubtable Manny Ramirez was strolling to the plate, to loud booing from the
Yankee bleachers. LeCompte got to her feet and joined them. (�Ramirez is awful! � she says.)
She loves booing at the Stadium. She loves the noise and the ads and the video screens and every
bit of the music, from the scratchy old Kate Smith recording of �God Bless America� to the
�Y.M.C.A.� of the grounds crew. She thinks of a night game in the South Bronx as an inspirational mise en sc�ne, perhaps because it is the only spectacle in town that achieves so
naturally the elegant, chaotic harmony of the best of her pop-classical, mixed-genre,
technologically and textually tangled Wooster Group productions. Consider �House/Lights,�
from 1998, in which Gertrude Stein�s �Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights� meets a sixties lesbian S &
M cult flick called �Olga�s House of Shame.� Or her newest project, �La Didone,� in which
Francesco Cavalli�s seventeenth-century opera travels to the edge of the galaxy by way of
another Italian classic called �Planet of the Vampires.� She watches the players as if she were
scouting actors for a new production. She can spot the style of a West Indian island or a prairie
town in the way each Yankee performs; she thinks about how he would do onstage. �Jeter�s a
great player, but he�s too self-conscious,� she said, nodding in the direction of the Yankee
captain, who was leaning over the dugout fence, pointedly nursing an injured thumb as Ramirez
connected on the second pitch and sent the ball soaring toward the left-field stands. �He could
never be an actor.� But when Melky Cabrera, racing deep into the outfield, leaped into the air for
a catch that effectively saved the game, she whispered, �I liked that leap! Maybe I could use it.�
Elizabeth LeCompte is a small, slender, fine-boned woman of sixty-three, with dark-green eyes
and silvery blond hair that she winds up into a floppy twist at the back of her head, and the
slightly startled look of someone whose considerable beauty, not to mention talent, has caught
her unaware. People meeting LeCompte for the first time receive that look. It tells them that the
famous materfamilias of American experimental theatre is really a timid, fragile sort of person,
and of course they want to please her. Her shyness may be her best weapon in the arsenal of what
could be called the LeCompte performance. There isn�t another director in the country whose
demands are so exhaustingly eclectic, or whose disapproval is so direct and steely, or whose
enthusiasms are so sudden and so shifting that a few hours of rehearsal can leave her actors
reeling with what one described to me as �imagination fatigue.� But no one who has ever worked
with her regrets the experience, and everyone in the business seems to want to have it.
Actors often talk about �the genius of Elizabeth LeCompte.� Scholars of performance art write
books and monographs and dissertations about the influence of Derrida or Barthes or Foucault on
LeCompte�s work, and on the theories of theatre that have led her to deconstruct or dissect a
play�to take something familiar, something you know, or think you know, subject it to every
conceivable transgression of interpretation and form, and return it to you illuminated and
deepened. Luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde�Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter
Sellars among them�describe her as first among equals. Susan Sontag sat in the first row at
every one of her openings, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is building a theatre for her in his new arts
center in New York. In thirty years of directing, she has survived both the storm troopers of
political correctness and the reverence attendant on a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar
MacArthur �genius� award. (She gave the money to her group.) She says, �I am not an
intellectual. I am not trying to mean anything�I�m trying to have a good time.�
She works out of a tiny theatre at 33 Wooster Street, in SoHo, called the Performing Garage,
where the Wooster Group was born, in the late seventies, and where it still rehearses and,
occasionally, performs. Her core company consists of seventeen actors, technicians, and
designers, living, as she does, on salaries that average about thirty thousand dollars a year�most
notably Kate Valk, a fifty-year-old actress who is one of the group�s founding members, and two
younger actors, Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos, who are in their thirties. You will also find a couple of �associates� in every LeCompte play. They can be friends pitching in. They can be
strangers whose style happens to take LeCompte�s fancy. They can be pop performance artists
like Casey Spooner, of the electro-clash duo Fischerspooner, who signed on as Laertes (and
added a comic turn as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) in the new �Hamlet�; or movie stars like
Frances McDormand, who played the nurse Oenone in the 2002 New York run of �To You, the
Birdie!��LeCompte�s �Ph�dre,� transported from Racine�s Peloponnesian court to a badminton
court on the stage of St. Ann�s Warehouse, under the Brooklyn Bridge, and featuring the longest,
if not the only, enema in theatre history.
McDormand describes the lure of LeCompte this way: �I was a middle-aged actress, and to get
to work with Liz, with the only company I know with a real mission to entertain and subvert�it
was like being reborn into a new life. I loved it. But I discovered that I was definitely a
freelancer. I couldn�t do it again.� For freelancers, rehearsals are an initiation by endurance.
�They were athletic! � McDormand says. Valk slugged her on the first day. A few days later, she
sprained her ankle. She trained with Chinese �fast-ball� Ping-Pong and badminton coaches, and
says, �My greatest, maybe my only, contribution was that I�d been a majorette�I could twirl a
badminton racquet. The worst was I couldn�t function with that earwiggy thing��she means an
earphone��that Liz makes everybody wear. She�s always talking through it, keeping at you,
throwing you off balance, which is how she likes you to be, onstage. I said to Liz, �I can�t do
that.� She said, �What do you do?� I said, �I get up and say the lines.� It took us a while to
negotiate what you could call our different styles.� The earphone went. (LeCompte says, �When
I direct, it�s not natural; it�s a performance.�)
Valk, an actress of legendary versatility (she was a drama student at N.Y.U. when she
volunteered at the Garage, as a costume seamstress, and in a few years became LeCompte�s
female star and closest friend), put the experience this way: �Liz shy? Liz fragile? Don�t believe
it. When I met her, it was more like I had found a master I wanted to serve, and she saw in me
something she wanted to use. Now that our relationship is more, well, symmetrical, I know that
she�s the person who is serving�not herself but this huge vision. Her imagination is one huge,
fertile playground, and for her, with actors, there�s really only one question: How far can you go,
what�s available to you, as a performer? She�s there to engage that.�
LeCompte herself says sweetly, �I am a classic voyeur. I love to watch. I feel like God,
watching. I did some acting once. I hated that. What I loved was getting people on the stage
doing what I wanted. I watch them for something that precedes the words, for a physical
metaphor for where the words come from. I don�t want illustration. Theatre isn�t illustrative.
Theatre is Katie as Emperor Jones��a role that Valk reprised last year, in the group�s revival of
a nineties production of the O�Neill play��and the way she holds her body, the way she moves
in diagonals. She inhabits something so strong that, when she speaks, the words and that
�something� are equal. And when I see that happen, those two tracks coming together, it�s
�Ah!��it�s an epiphany. I say this because I�m never sure of what that is, starting out. And I
really don�t care.�.
The truth is that not even LeCompte can describe how she conjures up the elements of what will
become a Wooster Group play. The �Hamlet� that went to Barcelona fifteen months ago �not
quite there� was already shedding its classic Shakespearean skin when it got to the Festival
d�Automne, in Paris, five months later, but it was still �not there.� (�Why do I do this? Why do I
go on?� she said, when the curtain fell at Beaubourg.) She pronounced it �getting there� in
March, after a month of previews at St. Ann�s Warehouse, and in June it became �almost there�
in Amsterdam. LeCompte is not talking about the acting, or the technological mix, or even her
own directing, when she says �not there.� In some ways, her �Hamlet� today looks pretty much
the same as it did fifteen months ago in Spain�the difference being that, somewhere in what she
calls �the process,� those elements started to fall together in the peculiarly Wooster Group way
that everyone in the company was waiting for, especially LeCompte herself.
The stage is minimal. A modular aluminum frame outlines a few deceptively quiet images: a
wheeled armchair; Hamlet sitting in the armchair, reading; three video monitors facing out into
the theatre and replicating bits and pieces of the actor and the stage; a wide stepped platform,
stage left; and, behind it all, a large movie screen on which the curtain is about to rise on Richard
Burton�s �Hamlet.� This is the look of a LeCompte production just before the world in her
aluminum frame splinters into action and refraction�into the constant reconfigurations of
illusion that you could call her signature. It happens in seconds here: Hamlet twists himself
toward the screen and shouts, �O.K., play that movie!,� and what you get for the next three hours
is a virtual �downloading� of the film that Burton made of his own stage �Hamlet,� in 1964�an
attentive, impatient, fiercely disciplined, and comically anarchic return of that famous star turn to
the theatre.
LeCompte once said that she works on a play as if it were a new house. �I attach terrifically to
houses,� she told me. �I like to build them�I have the visual idea right away�and fill them. I
bide my time and I don�t move on very quickly. With a play, it�s the same.� Her stage directions
consist of broad, linear swoops and mysterious smudges that she sketches into her rehearsal
notes and then takes home and studies and keeps adjusting until, in her mind�s eye, everything
seems to be moving right. The stage designer Jim Clayburgh, who created the first of the
modular frames that, you could say, manage the field of play for LeCompte�s imagination, put it
this way: �Liz directs with her eyes. She �sees� thoughts, �sees� ideas. That�s her talent.� And her
old friend Peyton Smith, an actress who worked with her for almost twenty years, told me, �Liz
watches the worst kind of television and reads the finest books, she goes to the opera one night
and a ballgame the next�and brings all those ideas and images to the theatre. She watches, she
reads, she directs like she eats, picking at a little of everything. She gives you a little hit of this or
that, and then you finish the collage�she�ll put things on the table and say, �Here, entertain me,�
and then kind of disappear. But then she�ll say, �God, I hate that!,� and start discarding,
rearranging, changing her mind, changing it back. You have to trust her. Even when it hurts.�
LeCompte grew up in New Jersey, the second of four children in a scrappy suburban household.
�The six of us fought and screamed over the news on �Huntley-Brinkley� � is how she describes
dinnertime at home. Her mother, who had gone to Barnard, was �the literary one, the one who
took me to the library.� Her father, an engineer with a local rubber company, was happiest on his
sailboat. �They stuck it out; I admired that,� she says. �They gave me a measure of what was not
me. I was not going to be a librarian. I was going to be the most famous person in the world.� Her younger sister, Ellen, a self-described dropout actress (LeCompte prefers �bon vivant�), told
me that as a girl LeCompte was �vain, selfish�she was a cheerleader; she had boyfriends�and
always a little angry, but she was also very protective.� She said, �We shared a bedroom, and, in
that volatile household, she�d tell me stories at night to calm me down. And she was a stand-up
person. I liked that best about her. You don�t go to Liz for comfort. You go to find out what she
thinks.� LeCompte agrees with �angry.� She founded a girl gang at the age of seven. She fought
with boys. (�Once, I lost; I was so mad.�) She liked playing boys� games�she was the only girl
on her junior-high softball team�though not as much as she now likes watching figure skating,
�where they�re all so fabulously tarted up, and you can wonder, What are they going to wear?�
By high school, she wanted to be a painter. �I don�t really remember why,� she says. �It was
little things. I read a book about Benjamin West, who made his own paint. I had a crazy neighbor
who painted. She made liquid chocolate pudding, and I liked her.� Once, talking about the �big,
minimalist abstract charcoal architectural drawings� that she produced as a student at Skidmore,
in the mid-sixties, she said, �All I knew was that I was going to be an artist. That was wild for a
girl of my generation from New Jersey at a middling college. My mother had been a bit of a
rebel once. She got married in a deep-purple velvet dress. But then she got confused, or maybe it
was disinterest. I always kept my eye on the prize.�
In 1963, when LeCompte was a college freshman, she landed a Friday-through-Sunday job
baking and waitressing at a Saratoga Springs coffeehouse called the Caff� Lena. The Lena was a
paid-with-meals pit stop for a lot of young folksingers�Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie among
them�and, eventually, for a group of actors recruited by an expatriate Welsh director named
John Wynne-Evans, who used the caf� as a weekend theatre. �He hired all the handsome young
men,� LeCompte says. �But he had no ing�nues. So the ing�nue was me.� Her first play was
called �The Constant Lover,� after the John Suckling poem; her second was Camus�s �Caligula.�
�I had trouble learning the lines,� she says. �He didn�t mind. �Just sit there,� he said, �and wear
these clothes.� � One of the handsome young men was the actor Spalding Gray. He was twentyfour
then�capricious, adventurous, temperamental, tormented, and undeniably gifted. Ellen
LeCompte described him to me as �a giving narcissist, a warm place to be, with lots of self-love
to go around.� He and Elizabeth LeCompte lived together, off and on, for twelve years.
�I liked the whole scene,� LeCompte says of their first few years in New York. �We had that
security that middle-class kids had then, before the worst of the Vietnam War. We somehow
knew that, for us, it would be all right.� They moved to a railroad flat on Ninety-third Street off
Second Avenue. They rented an apartment in San Miguel de Allende. They worked as extras in
B movies, playing hippies. LeCompte sold postcards at the Metropolitan Museum and drew, at
night, in a makeshift studio at home, while Gray made the Off Broadway rounds, dropping off
his r�sum�. The director Richard Schechner, whose company, the Performance Group, was
installed in the building on Wooster Street that LeCompte�s company owns now, discovered the
r�sum� in 1969, during a casting crisis for a retelling of �Macbeth��Macduff had quit to play
Mr. Peanut in the Planters commercials�and four days later Gray opened at the Performing
Garage. LeCompte went to work for the company in 1970. She started off as a designer. A year
later, she was Schechner�s assistant director. By the end of that year (with Schechner away in
Asia), she was directing the group herself. When he came home, he cast her in Sam Shepard�s
�The Tooth of Crime,� and eventually cajoled her into three more plays. He says that the things
she hated about acting were the things that made her memorable as an actress: her fright, her
embarrassment, and the look on her face that told an audience, �I wish I were someplace else.�
Most of the actors who went on to work with LeCompte started out at the Garage with
Schechner: among them, Ron Vawter, a mainstay of the Wooster Group, who died, of AIDS, in
1994, at the age of forty-five; and Willem Dafoe, who was a twenty-two-year-old doctor�s son
from a small Milwaukee repertory company when Schechner encountered him at a theatre
festival in Baltimore. (�What I liked was that huge face, that menace and sensitivity,� Schechner
told me.) But Schechner�s own talents were, by his admission, fairly scattered. He wrote books
about theatre. He was interested in performance theory�he teaches performance art at N.Y.U.
now�and in the anthropology of theatre. In 1974, LeCompte and Gray formed a kind of
company within Schechner�s company, working together on �Sakonnet Point��the first play in
the trilogy about Gray�s troubled childhood and his mother�s suicide, known today as �Three
Places in Rhode Island.� At first, Schechner told them that, as long as they were on the stage
doing �Mother Courage� for him at seven, it was not a problem if they used it for their own play
at eleven. But the break was inevitable, and, as one of their old colleagues put it, �Liz�s star was
ascendant, and that meant �Exit Richard.� � LeCompte says, �I�m extremely competitive. In a
group, there�s only one leader, and if you�re the one you don�t have to compete, you�re free.�
�Sakonnet Point� opened at the Garage in 1975 and made downtown theatre history. It wasn�t a
monologue, like Spalding Gray�s later pieces. It was the first of LeCompte�s downloadings�an
acting out of the thoughts and people and confusions in Gray�s head. LeCompte often uses the
word �framing� to describe her work: �I hook into people�s dreams about themselves. I make a
frame for them. I get to know them. I say, �Oh, let�s find a way to give them back to you.� It
wasn�t that I had this thing about wanting to be a director. I said to Spalding, �I�ll make a frame
for your dreams.� � By the late seventies, LeCompte and Gray were living on Wooster Street,
across the street from the Garage and one floor down from the loft where LeCompte lives now.
They were working on the last piece of the Rhode Island trilogy, �Nayatt School,� and on an
epilogue called �Point Judith.� �What Liz was doing was the creation of Spalding,� Dafoe told
me. LeCompte says, �I just wasn�t as confident as Spalding. He gave me that confidence because
I could stand behind him. I didn�t care if people knew it was me. I saw him as a character in his
own drama. He was too literal. He had no visual sense. But the story? I could never touch that.�
Their relationship, though not their collaboration, ended in 1979, when LeCompte left Gray for
Dafoe, who was then appearing in Schechner�s production of Jean Genet�s �The Balcony.� Gray
later described the breakup to a reporter this way: �Whenever we�d play Monopoly, she�d flip
the board over if I got too far ahead. Someone that competitive needs to be with someone who
can pass the whip, and Willem can.� The breakup was actually much less rancorous. Gray and
LeCompte divided their loft with a wall and a door that was never locked, and he acted in her
productions for the next several years. Eventually, he married. (In 2001, he was injured in a car
crash, and not long afterward attempted suicide. In 2004, he disappeared; his body was found in
the East River.)
The Performing Garage officially changed hands in 1980, with LeCompte putting together a new
company whose founding members were to have a say on every invitation the company received
and every project it pursued. From the beginning, the Wooster Group was known for the odd
mixture of democratic illusion and despotic charm that she imposed. But by all accounts she hid
behind the company, the way she had hidden behind Gray. She never put her name forward, and
her friends say that for a long time not even her most attentive audiences understood how much
of the work was hers. Her son, Jack Dafoe�a public-policy researcher, three years out of Yale,
who has his father�s face and his mother�s piercing curiosity�told me, �Liz still spends a certain
amount of time hiding herself. I think she was always confident, but maybe she didn�t think that
as a woman she could do that�step center stage as the auteur.�
LeCompte spent twenty-five years with Dafoe. They never married, and they were often apart,
with LeCompte touring with the company and Dafoe commuting between his life onstage and
the life on-camera that made him a movie star and, in large part, kept the company secure. One
of their friends describes the Wooster Group in those days as �a French farce of entrances and
exits��a big, close, arty, eccentric, libidinous extended family. Jack was shepherded home from
school by his nanny, Dennis Dermody, a large blond man of irresistible gentleness and humor
whom Ron Vawter had discovered managing a Provincetown movie house and had brought to
New York as custodian of the �little tin cash box� in the lobby of the Garage. Dermody, who
today writes a movie column for the magazine Paper, is the family archivist�the one who kept
the scrapbooks of Jack, at three, in a Philippines jungle with his mother, watching Oliver Stone
film his father in �Platoon,� or of Jack, at five, in Morocco, waving to his father, nailed to the
Cross and dripping blood, in Martin Scorsese�s �The Last Temptation of Christ.� Dafoe says that
he thought of the Wooster Group then as a �forever factory� (�I fell in love with the woman and
the group�), that it gave him his legitimacy as an actor. When he was home, he put himself in
LeCompte�s hands, and, while they battled famously at rehearsals�he is eleven years younger
than she is, and their friends say he wanted all her attention�his performances were often
spectacular. LeCompte hates talking about Dafoe, who left her four years ago and married a
young Italian film director. The company shares her indignation and protects her privacy. �Willie
was the center of my life, not my work,� she says. �I was the center of my work.�
LeCompte�s projects often begin this way: someone in the group, not necessarily her, will come
in with a text, or have an idea, and if it pleases LeCompte the shape of a play slowly begins to
emerge. She will assemble her players and call in her designers and technicians and engineers.
She will listen to their thoughts and look at the things they bring�a book or a picture or a piece
of music or, for that matter, a piece of clothing�and take in their reactions and sometimes laugh
or, more often, groan while they stumble around inside their own heads in what could be called a
first rehearsal. (�For Liz, the beginning of a new piece is the hardest part,� Ari Fliakos says.
�She�s going to have to sit and watch us butt our heads together for the next few years, so we
better be entertaining. The fear of disappointing her is a trap that serves.�) And at some point you
will hear that epiphanous �Ah!� when LeCompte sees her idea and starts taking over,
transforming everything they have said or acted out with what Jim Clayburgh calls her
�meticulous arbitrariness,� and Kate Valk calls �the stuff she does,� and freelancers like Frances
McDormand call �the brutal part,� and LeCompte herself describes by saying, �I love the way
things change. It�s not an intellectual figuring out. I�m not a traditional director. I don�t like to be
in charge until I know what I want. I like to get lost in it until I know.�
It can be a long haul. The rehearsals for �Birdie!� continued off and on for two and a half years.
The work on �Hamlet,� which I started following in the spring of 2006, hoping to catch a full
cycle of the LeCompte process, had actually begun two years earlier, when Scott Shepherd, an
actor who is by his own admission �obsessed by the play,� organized some night readings,
downstairs at the Garage. LeCompte sat in on a few and one night said, �O.K., let�s do it!�
Shepherd has a pale, handsome face, wiry red hair, and a long, agile athlete�s body that can fill a
stage. He has been acting with the group since 1997, when LeCompte saw him perform with the
downtown theatre company Elevator Repair Service. Two years later, she started using him on
tours caught without a leading man because of Dafoe�s shooting schedule. Fliakos, who plays
Claudius to Shepherd�s Hamlet (he is sandy-haired, compact, and even more mysteriously
expansive), was an intern at the Garage, fresh from Duke, when LeCompte tapped him for the
same reason. Today, they provide the company with the strong male counterpoint to Valk�s
enormous talent and almost chameleon transformations (she is Ophelia and Gertrude) that it was
in danger of losing when Dafoe left, though, being primarily stage actors, they have nothing like
his movie-star celebrity.
LeCompte is pointedly unconcerned with the questions that plague most people who direct
�Hamlet�: Is Hamlet mad or sane? Does he love Ophelia? Does he desire his mother? Is the
ghost of his father real or a figment of his weak or guilty or burning imagination? She is not
interested in probing Hamlet�s character; she is amazed that anyone would find that interesting,
or the results enriching. (Six months into �the �Hamlet� process,� she invited the Harvard
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt to talk to the company about the play. She thanked him
for coming and said she was sorry, but it was hard to see how a director could apply all that
academic theory to the stage.) She prefers what you could call the style or artifice of character.
She is attached to surfaces. She believes in the power of surfaces to deepen and disturb�or, as
she puts it, to �surprise��reality. �If I had been born ten years later, I would definitely be in
television,� she once told me, by way of explaining why, apart from the hour she sets aside for
yoga every morning, the two television sets in her loft are almost always on. �I love that twodimensional
TV world. It�s not ambiguous, like film; I can feel the surface.�
LeCompte had never directed Shakespeare before she took on �Hamlet.� But she had seen
Richard Burton�s �Hamlet� when it played in New York in 1964. �I invited my mother,� she
says. �I wanted to go because it was Burton, and that meant Elizabeth Taylor might be there. I
loved Elizabeth Taylor�she had my name�and, after the play, there she was, all in pink, like
Jackie Kennedy, coming out of the stage door. It made a deep impression.� She says that when
she heard her actors at the Garage �struggling with that Shakespearean language� she started
watching �Hamlet� movies with them, and thought of Burton. �His was the first big-movie-star
Shakespeare on Broadway. He filmed the performance in Electronovision and showed it in
movie houses for two days, so everyone in America could see it at the same time. He was in love
with his own voice, and that was the attraction for Scott. The voice and the words. I thought,
This is what I do�bring things together. I take something, I copy it, and maybe something�s
revealed that�s not in the original. I go for that. It�s a way of passing on a tradition by reinventing
a play.�
LeCompte goes to every performance of every Wooster Group play. She folds herself into an
aisle seat, next to whatever assistant is logging her complaints or her satisfactions, and tries to
pretend that no one will recognize her, though of course by now some do. She is an avid
eavesdropper. She has been known to tape the comments that her audiences make after a
performance, and even accused of planning to use them for a new play. (She denies the part
about the play, but not the part about the taping.) She enjoys the thrill of anonymity; she says it
gives her a kind of nice power, and, besides, she could never endure the scrutiny she gives her
actors. �I hide from being watched by watching,� she once said. Even the thought of having her
picture taken leaves her close to panic�though you can catch glimpses of her in the rehearsal
videotapes stored upstairs at the Garage; she is the small blond woman scurrying across the stage
in old jeans, a baggy black pullover, and bright-red flats. Once, she agreed to sit for Annie
Leibovitz. �It wasn�t a celebrity picture,� she says. �I liked it. I looked eighty, from the Ozarks. I
looked like I was dying. A college friend I hadn�t heard from in twenty years saw it and called
and said, �Liz, are you all right?� �
In a way, LeCompte�s ideal production would be one that no one saw. She has never really got
used to the idea of having a play reviewed; some of the same papers that now talk about her
�genius� gave her such a terrible time, early on, that in 1987 she barred critics from the Garage
and didn�t invite them back for the next five years. In 1981, she lost nearly half her funding from
the New York State Council on the Arts, because of the critical uproar over a play called �Route
1 & 9 (The Last Act),� which combined pieces of Thornton Wilder�s �Our Town� with a
blackface routine that was both a reference to the great black vaudevillian Pigmeat Markham and
a sendup of the minstrel parodies of blackness that were once performed for the amusement of
whites. (The play ended with an orgiastic battle. Richard Schechner called it a �wonderful
embrace and simulation of chaos,� but virtually all the city�s mainstream critics pronounced it
racist.) In 1983, with the company about to preview a piece called �L.S.D.,� she had what she
calls her �Miller problem.� That production combined an acid trip with a deadpan latter-day
courtroom rendering of scenes lifted from �The Crucible,� Arthur Miller�s play about the Salem
witch trials.
�Miller was the same generation as my father�cheap,� she says. �We had called his agent for
months, but they were refusing to even talk price, so we decided to try it anyway, because, after
all, I wouldn�t care if I thought somebody stole from me. Jack was six months old then, Willem
was off on a movie, and I was struggling to finish the piece. I was such a wreck that there was
eczema seeping from my hands. We were six months into open rehearsals at the Garage, when
Miller finally showed up to see it. He came up the stairs and saw my hands with this huge
wrapping of gauze around them, and I told him, �Mr. Miller, I�ve had a very bad cooking
accident.� How could I say, �Mr. Miller, it�s eczema from my nerves, from coping with you.� So
he sat down, and it was pretty stunning for him. The first thing he said was �Why is the audience
laughing?� We were doing very well with �L.S.D.,� but he was a man who couldn�t tell where we
were coming from. A week later, his agent called and said, �No way!� He threatened to shut us
down. We shut down.� A year later, a �much less Miller� version of the play opened as �L.S.D.
(. . . Just the High Points . . .).� The cease-and-desist letter arrived in ten days.
The worst scrutiny, she says, is touring. She calls it �compromising� and says that it leaves her
feeling desolate. �At the Garage, it�s me doing the inviting, inviting you into my living room,�
she told me at breakfast, the day after the Paris �Hamlet� opening. �If you don�t like it, then it�s
just a bad party for you, nothing more. But, on tour, I�m selling a product. I have to please the
people who are paying us to come, and I don�t work for that. If I�m rejected, it�s no fun, and, if I
do well, then I�m pumped up in a way I don�t like, either.� It used to be a hallmark of
LeCompte�s productions that some of the audience would walk out, furious or bewildered, in the
middle of opening night�if they were not actually flinging vegetables at the stage. (�I�d sit there
with them. They�d throw the vegetables, and I�d go, �Yeah! Right!,� so they wouldn�t know it
was me.�) For years, she could predict it. Germans walked out of plays about women: �
�House/Lights�? A female Faust? No one would even book it. They�re not going to go there.�
The French walked out of plays about men: �Too messy, too chaotic,� they would say. The Scots
and the Spaniards and the Austrians (who were known for muttering �This is shit!� during any
Wooster Group play) walked out, period. They walk out less now. Some thirty people left after
the first act of the Barcelona �Hamlet.� By the time the company got to Paris, the number was
down to two. Audiences are in awe of LeCompte now, in ways that she says she really doesn�t
understand.
LeCompte�s loft is a kind of image box, as spare as the aluminum frame across the street at the
Garage, and as full of surprises: riverbed stones that she trucked in from an upstate stream,
scrubbed by hand in the bathtub, and laid out, like the border stones in a Japanese garden, to
absorb leaks from the old industrial pipes that line a poured-epoxy floor; framed college
drawings propped face to the wall near the front door, a little covert, like LeCompte herself; a
hanging patchwork quilt composed entirely of little plastic cocaine bindles, and an occasional
sniffing straw. The effect is peaceful. The clutter of the past is something she keeps downstairs,
like a stage set from some other play, in the half of the loft that she once shared with Gray and
then Dafoe. (Shepherd uses it now, and cooks at the Magic Chef that she and Gray dragged in
from the street in 1972.) It is overflowing with old furniture and with books that she brings
upstairs to read�there were three translations of Dostoyevsky�s �The Possessed� by her bed
when she started rehearsing �Hamlet��and always, in the end, returns. When I asked her why,
she said, �Upstairs is how I like my life now. Simple.�
She often talks about giving up the theatre. She says that she�s tired, or that she �can�t go on.�
Her friends are used to that. (Joanna Ross, who arranged the tours for LeCompte and Gray in the
early days, remembers her breaking down in the middle of a meeting with a Dutch producer who
had crossed the Atlantic to see her and sobbing, �I just don�t know if I can do this.� Ross, by her
account, �was quietly freaking out when Spuddy��Spalding Gray��intervened. He was very
calm. He said, �I want to do this, Liz. I want these plays to be seen.� And, amazingly enough, Liz
sat up, dried her tears, and said, �Let�s go.� �) But the pressures have grown with the company,
with its reputation, and with the cost and size and technological complexity of LeCompte�s
productions. She says that it has taken �too many projects, and too many tours,� just to keep
paying her bills and salaries. In the past thirteen months, she not only rehearsed and toured with
�Hamlet� and �La Didone� but created a performance piece called �Who�s Your DADA?!,� for
the Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art, and moved the company to Moscow for two
weeks for a revival of �To You, the Birdie!� �I was the only one voting against going to
Moscow,� she told me. �I was right. My first hotel room was a horrible little garret. There were
two thin cots, head to head, covered with cigarette burns. You couldn�t step on the bathroom
floor�I had to wash it�and when I left for a second somebody stole four hundred dollars from
my windowsill. But �Birdie!� was shocking to the Russians, and the people who brought us were
ecstatic; they liked shock. Russians tend to want big authority all the time, even in theatre. They
had to jump from Lenin to modern art. It was interesting. It worked out. It was O.K.�
You could describe the �Hamlet� that opens this month as the culmination of a grand battle
between LeCompte and Shakespeare. �I started out thinking, This is not our language,� she says.
�You can�t �translate� from his English. It seemed like a fetish to me, because I always see texts
as objects. They have a solidity�it�s not theoretical�and I don�t look for metaphor or analogy
or meaning. Then I started watching more of the �Hamlet� films.� At some point during the past
two years (she doesn�t remember when), she added a sweep of battlefield footage from Grigori
Kozintsev�s great Russian �Hamlet.� She toyed with the idea of slipping in a bit of Mel Gibson�s
earnestly turgid prince. By the time she got to Paris, Gibson had lost to a moment of Kenneth
Branagh, in eyestrain closeup, blasting away the ambiguities of the Burton film, and Charlton
Heston, in near-drag, declaiming as the Player King. (Today she is thinking about a dance
inspired by a �Hamlet� riff in a Vitaphone short from the nineteen-thirties.) She had replaced the
blocked Polonius (but not the ubiquitous collapsible walker that Polonius wheels around the
stage). She had put a microphone into Casey Spooner�s hands and told him to go ahead, croon
some lines. By the time of the St. Ann�s previews, the stage-right monitor had recovered. The
film came in and out of focus when it was meant to. The soundtrack, which sharpens and fades
and stops and starts, lost its static, except, of course, when LeCompte wanted static, and she
stopped calling to her soundmen, �Be more musical! This should be moving like water, not a
truck.� More to the point, the company was suddenly filled with �Hamlet,� possessed by the
play�in galloping pace with an edited �Burton template� that went into the actors� earphones,
stripped of what Shepherd (who did the stripping) calls �its �proper� rhythms of delivery, those
mental and emotional transitions, those pauses for meaning.� LeCompte, who had started by
saying, in effect, �Forget the words!,� decided that �Hamlet� was the words. They became the
telling surface, the artifice and style that deepens. Shakespeare had won the day, but on her
terms. �You see, it�s not the character; it�s the language,� she told me, the last time we talked
about the play. �It�s the words that hold everything together.
�I used to get mad at my plays, but it�s different now,� she said. �This thing, the theatre, it isn�t
necessary to me. My fears are about dying, and not being loved. You know what I want? I want a
dog. A dog who�s out hunting all day, and he comes home, pant, pant, and I know he loves me.
How do you define pleasure? Sometimes I just want to stare at the sky, to sit in a beautiful space
and stare at the sky through trees. Am I just lazy? I�m guilty even feeling that way. Well, not so
much guilty but anxious. And now�all the work I�m doing�I�m not even anxious, because I
know I could walk away. I see my friend Alex Katz, painting, painting�probably he�ll die
painting. �Oh, move over here,� I say. �Tell me your secret.� But my actors are happy. I�ve given
them something, and they�re entertaining me. It�s like downhill skiing. You go whoosh! And if
you don�t get there you do it again. It�s not one moment, or one performance. It�s �Will I make it
at the end of the day?� �.
The New York Times
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She Barely Even Looks Like Paul Robeson
By ADA CALHOUN
Published: March 12, 2006
REINVENTING a role identified with a legendary performer is never easy. Now consider how much more difficult the task might be if the performer is Paul Robeson, the role is that of a Pullman porter turned West Indies monarch and you are a middle-aged white woman.
But for Kate Valk, an original member of the experimental theater troupe the Wooster Group, such challenging roles are business as usual. This month she plays Brutus in the group's interpretation of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play "The Emperor Jones," which opened Saturday at St. Ann's Warehouse, appearing in blackface, her hair slicked back and her body draped in a hobo-Kabuki ensemble. Later this year, she will play Gertrude and Ophelia in a Wooster Group production of "Hamlet."
Indeed, for nearly 30 years, Ms. Valk has created memorable roles in irreverent productions. "She is without peer," said David Savran, who wrote the 1988 book "Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group." "I can't think of any other experimental performer who comes close to her." Mark Russell, who ran P.S. 122 from 1983 to 2004, said, "She's the Meryl Streep of downtown."
With a long list of superlative reviews and admirers, Ms. Valk might have followed Willem Dafoe, another of the Wooster Group's original members, and become a Hollywood star. But despite a few small films and an appearance in "The Manchurian Candidate" in 2004 (the company is friendly with the film's director, Jonathan Demme), Ms. Valk has performed almost exclusively with the troupe.
"I have so much power and liberty working with the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage," said Ms. Valk, who turned 50 on Monday. Arriving before rehearsal, she was without the emperor's heavy makeup, and ringlets of dark, curly hair framed her face. "I wouldn't want to take the time away from what we do by working with others," she explained, adding "How much power does a middle-aged woman have in film and TV? Look, there are some fantastic actresses and some great parts, but I never liked the camera. It's like a big black hole. I don't know who to be."
Particularly now, when her father is dying of cancer, Ms. Valk is grateful to have the group as her second family, one she's seen through years of turmoil. "People have gone crazy, people have died of AIDS, people have killed themselves, people have retired happily to other endeavors, people have divorced," Ms. Valk said of fellow company members. "I think the most wonderful thing is that everything we do is an extension of who we are."
And who is Ms. Valk? Her mother was a nurse; as for her father, she laughed: "You know, we didn't know all the time what my father did. He worked for the post office when I was born, then for a cement company, at a remodeling company, at real estate ventures in Baltimore. We would just make up what he was when they asked at school. I remember saying once he was a gangster."
The family moved frequently, from Spokane, Wash., to towns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Maryland. At 16, Ms. Valk began working part-time at a nursing home, then attended two years of state college in Pennsylvania. Still, she longed for New York, and transferred at 19 to New York University's drama department. She found an ideal day job at Ding-a-Ling Taxi. "It was fantastic because I love the telephone," Ms. Valk said. "They can't see you, right? You can be anybody. And then you can get into the best conversations. It gave me such a picture of New York when I first got here."
Through N.Y.U., she spent two years studying with Stella Adler. "She was very much oriented to physical circumstance, not emotional recall, which suited me," Ms. Valk said. "I liked working from the outward in � probably because I could escape my own psychology."
With only a semester left, she reached a crisis point: "I thought, am I going to be an actress?" Ms. Valk didn't see how she could go through the process of getting headshots and auditioning. She felt (and still feels) an inability to sell herself when not onstage. Through N.Y.U.'s then-new Experimental Theater Wing, Ms. Valk encountered Elizabeth LeCompte, Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray of the Wooster Group and was smitten. When she got out of school, in 1979, she volunteered for Ms. LeCompte, the group's director. In 1981 she appeared (and made live phone calls onstage to takeout restaurants) in "Route 1 & 9," a commingling of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" with the minstrel stylings of Pigmeat Markham. For that use of blackface, the group lost nearly half its financing from the New York State Council on the Arts. But Ms. Valk distinguished herself as a performer and has appeared in every Wooster show since.
The experimental director Richard Foreman, who directed Ms. Valk in two shows in the mid-1980's, said, "You had the feeling aside from her talent as an actress she was taking full responsibility for everything she touched in the play, everything that happened."
Ms. Valk said she does not share many theatergoers' dissatisfaction with today's offerings. While she admits going through a period in the 80's when she stopped seeing shows, she has rebounded, and radiates a refreshing enthusiasm for the New York theater world.
"Have you seen Bergman's 'The Magician'?" she asked. In the film, a girl pleads with a theater company on the lam to take her with them, and Ms. Valk gets almost misty-eyed recounting the scene. "That's the regenerative thing about theater," she said. "I just am thrilled any time a new person walks in the door and says, 'Use me.' "
If she hasn't reached the level of fame or financial success one might see as her due, it's clear she's not sacrificing much. As Mr. Russell said: "Ron Wood probably has opportunities to be in a lot of other bands, but why would he? He's already in the Rolling Stones."
W. E. B. DuBois
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The Negro and Our Stage
The leaflet issued with each new production at the Provincetown Playhouse—Season 1923-24
We all know what the Negro, for the most part, has meant on the American stage. He has been a lay figure whose business it was usually to be funny and sometimes pathetic. He has never, with very few exceptions, been human or credible. This, of course, cannot last.
The most dramatic group of people in the history of the United States is the American Negro. It would be very easy for a great artist so to interpret the history of our country as to make the plot turn entirely on the black man. Thus two classes of dramatic situations of tremendous import arise—the inner life of this black group and the contact of black and white.
It is going to be difficult to get at these facts for the drama and treat them sincerely and artistically, because they are covered by a shell, or shall I say a series of concentric shells? First comes the shell of what most people think the Negro ought to be, and this makes every one a self-appointed and preordained judge to say without further thought or inquiry whether this is untrue or that is wrong. Then, secondly, there comes the great problem of the future relations of groups and races not only in the United States but throughout the world. To some people this seems to be a tremendous and imminent problem, and, in their wild anxiety to settle it in the only way which seems to them the right way, they are determined to destroy art, religion and good common sense in an effort to make everything that is said or shown propaganda for their ideas.
These two protective shells most of us recognize; but there is a third shell that we do not so often recognize and whose sudden presence fills us with astonishment; and that is the attitude of the Negro world itself.
This Negro world which is growing in self consciousness, economic power and literary expression is tremendously sensitive. It has sore toes, nerve-filled teeth, delicate eyes and quivering ears. And it has these because during its whole conscious life it has been maligned and caricatured and lied about to an extent inconceivable to those who do not know. Any mention of Negro blood or Negro life in America for a century has been occasion for an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast. The result is that the Negro today fears any attempt of the artist to paint Negroes. He is not satisfied unless everything is perfect and proper and beautiful and joyful. He is afraid to be painted as he is, lest his human foibles and shortcomings be seized by his enemies for the purposes of the ancient and hateful propaganda.
Happy is the artist that breaks through any of these shells, for his is the kingdom of eternal beauty. He will come through scarred and perhaps a little embittered,—certainly astonished at the almost universal misinterpretation of his motives and aims. Eugene O'Neill is bursting through. He has my sympathy for his soul must be lame with the enthusiasm of the blows rained upon him. But it is work that must be done. No greater mine of dramatic material ever lay ready for the great artist's hands than the situation of men of Negro blood in modern America.
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Companhia Triptal's performance of
Homens ao Mar (Sea PLays)
Chicago Tribune
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January 15, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Zona De Guerra (In the Zone)
O'Neill's In the Zone becomes a salty voyage
By Chris Jones
There are some mighty salty dogs in Companhia Triptal's visceral production of In the Zone, the guttural Eugene O'Neill "sea play" from 1917. Actually, salty doesn't fully capture the bark of these rather terrifying Brazilian actors. This is one feral pack. Perchance these visitors to Chicago—part of the Goodman Theatre's provocative exploration of the international impact of O'Neill—prepared for their first entrance Wednesday night by wandering around outside on Dearborn Street and comparing the feel to that of a Brazilian summer. That would explain why you can see the whites of everyone's eyes.
Indeed, Andre Garolli's ensemble production is a very compelling way to pass 70 minutes or so in the theater. It's a stylized, intense, overtly physical concept wherein very masculine, hyped-up men re-create the sweat, angst, shifting allegiances and pervasive paranoia that inevitably arises when you confine a group of males in close quarters for a protracted period of time.
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Chicago Sun-Times
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January 16, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Zona De Guerra (In the Zone)
'War Zone' puts Goodman audiences through profound sea change
By Hedy Weiss
Chalk it up as the first great revelation of the Goodman Theatre's current festival devoted to a global exploration of the plays of Eugene O'Neill and the many different ways in which his work is being imagined in the 21st century. The production of Zona de Guerra (In the War Zone) that opened Wednesday night—the first of three of O'Neill's early plays, all set on the sea, and all being presented by Brazil's Companhia Triptal—is an example of the most sublime theatrical witchcraft. The fact that the Goodman engagement also marks the troupe's first performances outside Brazil is only an additional reason to celebrate.
Written between 1914 and 1917 and inspired by the playwright's experiences as a young merchant seaman, the one-act sea plays conjured both that sense of haunted human souls and the elements of expressionistic style that would become O'Neill trademarks. But you also get the feeling that Companhia Triptal seized on this play—the story of a ship full of men who are ferrying ammunition across the Atlantic during World War I and are terrified of being blown up by mines or torpedoes—as a timely commentary on what can happen to people caught up in in a war on terror.
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examiner.com
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January 15, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Zona De Guerra (In the Zone)
Must see at-sea: From Brazil, a Eugene O'Neill one-act
By Catey Sullivan
It's only running through Sunday—which is all the more reason to brave the elements and hightail it to the Goodman Theatre for the Brazilian Companhia Triptal's utterly spellbinding production of Eugene O'Neill's Zona de Guerra ("In the Zone.") An early one-act that's rarely-unto-never produced, the piece puts the audience deep in the claustrophobic belly of a rusting ship.
Here, in a hellish artificial twilight, a paranoid group of seaman band together in fear to destroy one of their own. Part Lord of the Flies, part Dante's Inferno and wholly enthralling for its breathless, 60-minute run time, Zona de Guerra is performed in Portuguese with supertitles. Don't let that intimidate you. Directed by Andre Garolli, it is a drama of electrifying intensity—the language only adds a layer to its inherent mystery.
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The Hypocrites's performance of The Hairy Ape
Chicago Sun-Times
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February 13, 2009
Ape swings at dehumanizing forces
THEATER REVIEW | O'Neill's shocking power is strong as ever
RECOMMENDED
By Hedy Weiss
With the arrival of director Sean Graney's viscerally and visually arresting take on The Hairy Ape, the Goodman Theatre's festival exploring Eugene O'Neill in the 21st century has reached its halfway mark. Director Robert Falls' gargantuan production of Desire Under the Elms is headed to Broadway (with a spring date still to be set). The Wooster Group has returned to New York. The fabulous Brazilians of Companhia Triptal are back in Sao Paolo. And a Dutch company is still ahead of us, along with Chicago's Neo-Futurists.
But even at the midway point it is easy to proclaim: O'Neill's ability to mix the real and the mythic, to conjure hallucinatory, nightmarish visions, cosmic politics and gut-level passions, and to bring to the stage a kind of singing, pounding, half-crazy sense of the mysteries of existence, is astonishing and often downright shocking. Decades after his death, he feels intensely modern, and his feverish sense of ego, inequity and loss seems peculiarly right for our time.
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Toneelgroep Amsterdam's performance of
Rouw siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra)
at Goodman Theatre
Toneelgroep Amsterdam's performance of
Rouw siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra) in Amsterdam
Toneelgroep Amsterdam's other performances
Chicago Tribune
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February 26, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | Rouw Siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra)
Toneelgroep Amsterdam: Four riveting stars
By Chris Jones
It�s R-rated, video-infused, performed in Dutch, lasts three throbbing hours and 10 throbbing minutes and meditates on matters tragic. If you have a problem with any of that quintet of particular qualities, stay away from the Toneelgroep Amsterdam�s astounding version of Eugene O�Neill�s Mourning Becomes Electra, and save a seat for someone who�ll appreciate a revelatory and superbly performed show that, sadly, is in Chicago only through Saturday night.
Ivo van Hove, Toneelgroep�s director, is only just now developing the kind of stateside reputation that comes close to matching his talents: this contemporary version of Mourning is making its American premiere at the Goodman Theatre�s O�Neill Festival. When and if it gets to New York, Dutch actress Halina Reijn, who plays the Electra-esque Lavinia, will blow those uptight Manhattan arty types halfway back across the Atlantic.
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The Eugene O'Neill Review
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Volume 26, 2004
THEATER REVIEW | 'MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA' in Amsterdam
By EGIL TÖRNQVIST
MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA [Rouw siert Electra in the Dutch translation of Ger Thijs], presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove: Opening at Het Toneelschuur, Haarlem, 15 Nov. 2003.
When Ivo van Hove in 1989 staged Mourning Becomes Electra at the Zuidelijk Toneel Company (the performance is reviewed by Marc Maufort in The Eugene O'Neill Review,13.2 [1989] 73-77), he was already stressing the existential aspects of the trilogy rather than its surface realism. This was modestly suggested by visually linking the mid-nineteenth century with the late twentieth century. In his new, second staging of the trilogy, he went one step further. The references to the American Civil War were hardly noticeable. We were concerned with war in general; even the music of the brass band heard intermittently did not especially relate to the war O'Neill had in mind. In fact, the war aspect was altogether marginalized in the performance.
In the Oresteia the chain of guilt begins with Agamemnon's sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra's daughter Iphigenia; this partly motivates Clytemnestra's fatal revenge on her husband. In Mourning Becomes Electra there is no sacrificed daughter; Christine's revenge here concerns the lifedenying Mannon Puritanism. In van Hove's performance the American setting was universalized. We were here concerned with the plight of man. What O'Neill hides under a veneer of surface realism, van Hove presented undisguised as a mental conflict within each of the characters, made visual through sudden shifts between closeness and distance, tenderness and cruelty.
Van Hove cut the trilogy to a running time of three and a half hours. He left out O'Neill's counterpart of the Greek chorus, the townsfolk, who keep commenting on the Mannons, and he had the ship's scene in Part Two, presented as a film, radically shortened.
The simple permanent set, by van Hove's regular scene designer Jan Versweyveld, showed a gray wall with a rectangular black opening in the middle, a visualization, it seemed, of the Mannon coolness, angularity, and death-in-life. Rather than a private environment, the bare setting had the characteristics of an office or a classroom By means of an overhead projector, assisted by the Mannons' man of all work, Seth Beckwith (Hugo Koolschijn), the titles of the three trilogy parts were written in blood-red letters on the wall.
Contrasting with the grim interior was the attractive exterior, shown in the form of a stream of pictures emanating from a TV set. Here both the characters and the audience could see the impressive, fake-Greek facade of the Mannon house, interspersed with beautiful landscapes and idyllic scenes of the past, corresponding to the characters' nostalgic longing for a return to virginal nature and childhood. At one point a clumsy animated film, showing a man, a woman and a palm tree on a tiny island, seemed to be an illustration of this childish longing and, when the couple was suddenly swallowed up by an enormous wave, a rejection of it.
The costumes were all modern and rather insignificant, except for the color. Van Hove abstained from the men's uniforms, retained O'Neill's contrast between the masculine black of the deathly Mannons and the feminine green of their women, and had Lavinia change from gray to green to black.
Each part opened in the same way. Before taking their various stage positions, the characters lined up downstage, faced the audience which at this point could be seen as corresponding to the peeping townsfolk in the trilogy. The characters took off their shoes and placed them in front of them on the stage. Was it a generic announcement, an indication that what the audience were to witness was not a trilogy on cothurni, i.e., not a tragedy, but something more modest, more suited to our time? Was it a hint at the Moslem custom of taking off one's shoes before entering the mosque? Or even a suggestion of the victims of the holocaust? The significance of this opening gesture was enigmatic in its suggestiveness.
Lavinia and Orin's healthy, everyday friends Peter (Alwin Pulinckx) and Hazel (Karina Smulders) were retained. Present on the stage throughout the trilogy, they witnessed like a second audience the destruction of the Mannon family, in this respect acting as a substitute for the omitted townsfolk chorus. In other respects they functioned as classical confidants, speaking partners and supporters of the main characters.
Like them, Ezra Mannon, engagingly incarnated by Pierre Bokma, by many seen as the most prominent male actor in the Netherlands today, was constantly present on the stage, both before his return from the war and after he was murdered by Christine (Janni Goslinga). Sitting next to his unfaithful wife and faithful daughter in an immobile position, he was a study in lifelessness, augmented by his stereotypical, monotonous way of speaking. Without looking at Christine, he undressed, declared his love for her, and then "raped" her from behind on the family table, while Lavinia, next to them, filmed their intercourse with her video camera, envious and rationally cool at the same time. In the last part Orin and Lavinia ended up in the same loveless love position as their parents. After his death, Ezra figured prominently in the form of two huge photos, projected on the gray wall, one of which showed him intermittently opening and closing his eyes, a striking image of the husband-father haunting his family.
Sharply contrasting with the lifelessness of the characters were their sudden outbursts, revealing their suppressed emotions. Ezra could suddenly break through his grown-up military mask and show us the weeping child behind it. Lavinia, superbly acted by Halina Reijn, could suddenly reveal herself as the vulnerable little girl she is underneath her grown-up mask, when childishly attacking her mother.
While the actors belonging to Toneelgroep Amsterdam, this goes also for Hans Kesting as Adam Brant, showed a highly theatrical, at times grotesque style of acting, Jochum ten Haaf, a guest performer earlier successful as the young van Gogh in the play Vincent in Brixton, played Orin in a psychologically somewhat more realistic way. Although not specifically intended, the difference made sense since Brant is, after all, an outsider with regard to the Mannons.
O'Neill's stark ending shows Lavinia, left alone, joining her departed family in the darkened Mannon house, atoning for her sins by burying herself alive. Van Hove let her instead be embraced by old Seth, the guard of the Mannon mansion and at this point even a figure of Death. This was to my mind a more harmonious but less stark way of concluding a trilogy whose very title points to Lavinia's post-scenic self-affliction.
Fond of so-called cross-overs in the arts, van Hove's Mourning Becomes Electra was a veritable multimedia performance. While we watched Ezra live on the stage, we saw his face greatly enlarged projected on the back wall. Since an audience always tends to focus on the faces of the characters, the paradox arose that we disregarded the live person in favor of the film image of his face, as we often do in our daily life in the present media era. The danger of van Hove's approach is obviously that our attention is divided between various simultaneous stage effects: live theater, TV transmission, and video images. These stage effects inevitably distracted our attention from what the characters were saying, especially since they often spoke so fast, at times simultaneously, that it was difficult to hear what was being said. In short, the question is whether the noble aim, finding an arresting equivalent for the modern human condition, was not somewhat defeated by the means.
What van Hove seemed to be dealing with in this performance is our inability to communicate directly with one another. He even indicated a sad development. While the parents still attempted, without much success, to communicate directly with one another, their children were no longer able to do this. Thus a crucial dialogue between Orin and Lavinia occurred not face to face but via laptop messages. In agreement with this device, the characters' undressing themselves should be seen, I believe, as a way of finding a modern equivalent for O'Neill's mask-face dichotomy, especially since the contrast between costume (culture) and nudity (nature) is inherent in the trilogy, where it is expressed as a contrast between the life-denying Puritanism of New England and the joie de vivre of the South Sea islands.
As is often the case with his productions, van Hove's second Mourning Becomes Electra was a far cry from the more or less realistic way in which this trilogy is usually presented. To some it would, like some of O'Neill's plays, seem to be the result of an all too eager desire to experiment. To others it would show a forceful determination to stage the text in such a way that it would, to quote O'Neill, indicate a sense of fate "which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in the gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by."
The Eugene O'Neill Review
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Volume 26, 2004
STAGING O'NEILL TODAY
An Interview with Ivo van Hove
By EGIL TÖRNQVIST
Of all the more prestigious directors in Europe today, no one is so concerned with O'Neill as Ivo van Hove, presently heading both the foremost theatre group in the Netherlands, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, and the annual Holland Festival.
When I visited him in his office on a canal in central Amsterdam where Toneelgroep Amsterdam has been located for about a year, he had just returned from a teaching period in San Diego. An attractive man in his mid-forties, not altogether unlike O'Neill, he is in good spirits, having just received several offers to direct in reputable American theaters. He has even had a new play written for him by an American dramatist who, unlike van Hove, does not like O'Neill.
Born and bred in Flemish Belgium van Hove had studied law for a few years in Antwerp when he decided to turn to the theater, much to the dislike of his parents. His first production, in 1981, passed unnoticed in his native country but received favorable comment in The Drama Review. In 1987 van Hove was allied with the theater group De Tijd (The Time). During the 1990s he was head of Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven, Holland. Since then he has held a central position in Dutch-Belgian cultural life. As a theater manager he knows what he wants, and has the characteristics of a leader. As a director he has staged a number of acclaimed, some would say controversial, productions, often devoted to the classics. His productions have been shown at festivals in several European cities. For his New York version of More Stately Mansions he received an Obie.
As a director, van Hove strives to be very clear and at the same time polyinterpretable. The directorial "message" should, he says, be distinctly formulated and at the same time open to various interpretations. Clearly averse to Stanislavski realism, he creates performances directed to what he sees as the heart of the matter, the inner, universal-psychological realism, what O'Neill called "the drama of souls." Characteristic of the acting style he cherishes is that the characters switch very quickly from one mood to another, from passionate outbursts to cool distance, but "every moment is true in itself." The restlessness of modern man can be sensed in this changeability.
The work process from initial decision to opening night, he describes metaphorically as a journey from, say, Amsterdam to Moscow. The director, he finds, has an obligation to map out this journey to his theatrical team already at the start. By that time he has already, together with his scene designer, decided on the setting in which the drama is to take place. The team, notably the actors, then have the opportunity to decide, together with the director, whether the journey should go via Berlin or Vienna, whether by air, train or coach. As for the theater critics, he is skeptical of those who see the trees rather than the woods, the "special effects" rather than the underlying concept. "A piece of art should not be hacked into pieces" is what he tells his students at the Theater Academy in Antwerp.
Despite or because of his Catholic upbringing, he does not believe in a higher power. Yet his upbringing may well have affected his belief that we are responsible for our own actions and that what we call fate or destiny is simply hypocrisy, a way of trying to escape responsibility. The relationship between free will and determinism is obviously of key importance to van Hove, as it has been to many dramatists. A rational person with an intense wish to explain the actions of the characters, he regards himself as "a psychological theater maker." But psychology is not enough. The performance must reach out beyond everyday reality and become "poetically" true. This naturally brings us to O'Neill. As van Hove has said:
I have once in a while called O'Neill America's Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare he manages to present a very personal message in totally different ways.
A second, even more important reason why he appeals to me is that the oeuvre of O'Neill is characterized by a great amount of necessity, the need, even while writing, to fathom why you are in this world, how you see this life and which oppositions you are confronted with. These are big themes close to my heart.
O'Neill wrote out of necessity. I make theatre for the same reason.
When van Hove chose to do Desire Under the Elms (Begeren onder de olmen) in the early nineties, many were surprised at the choice. But having been brought up in a small village surrounded by farmers, van Hove sensed a connection between that kind of life and that of New England farmers a hundred or more years ago. Moreover, he declared, "I'm in love with this play. It is a small, forgotten jewel." van Hove has often shown a predilection for forgotten jewels. The idea behind the production was to create a piece of emotional theater, to make the emotions behind the laconic lines obvious. The translation was based on a somewhat constructed East-Flemish dialect. The names were adjusted to the Flemish environment. Ephraim became Jozef, Abbie was called Bie. The most startling effect was the placing of live cows on the stage. The idea behind this extreme form of naturalism was to emphasize the genuineness of the people in the play by surrounding them with an authentic environment. However, when I saw the performance I found the bellowing cows more of a distraction than an asset.
In the mid-nineties van Hove nourished the plan to do first A Touch of the Poet, then More Stately Mansions and finally to combine the two, thereby "providing a glimpse of O'Neill's gigantic Cycle." A Touch of the Poet was both translated and rehearsed when it appeared that the actor cast as Melody had problems with his part and the production was called off.
More Stately Mansions, somewhat prosaically entitled Rijkemanshuis in Dutch, on the other hand, was an immediate success when it opened in Eindhoven, a success that was repeated when van Hove directed it again with an American cast in New York. (The latter production has been reviewed by Robert S. MacLean in The Eugene O'Neill Review [1997]: 178-182, and by Yvonne Shafer in The Eugene O'Neill Review [1998]: 218-220.) Dutch critics had no problem with the fact that More Stately Mansions, though uncompleted, was staged. In the United States opinions were somewhat divided on this point. When comparing the Dutch situation with the American one, van Hove expressed the belief that European actors, more than their American colleagues, focus on how the text should be interpreted. They see the text primarily as gas to enable the car to ride.
It was on the occasion when he had already conceptualized his second production of Mourning Becomes Electra (reviewed above) that van Hove happened to see the American documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. The film which demonstrates how a once happy family disintegrates under pressure of their alleged hidden crimes, had a great impact on him and confirmed, as it were, the actuality of O'Neill's trilogy and the meaningfulness of his own approach to it. Characteristic of the Friedmans is that they record their own misery by filming it. Similarly, van Hove lets Lavinia create her own "photo album" by having her film her own family in exceedingly revealing situations. The central underlying idea behind the production has much to do with van Hove's own experience of denying the importance of your parents until, eventually, you realize that you cannot escape them, that you are not unique, that whether you like it or not you are a product of a father and a mother. Van Hove: "At the end Lavinia realizes that she cannot escape her parents. Even though they are dead, she has to live with them. She must learn to mourn the terrible things that have happened. If you don't learn to reconcile yourself with past wrongdoing or with your own origin, you will never find peace. I feel a strong emotional connection to this view of life."
The unabridged translation by Ger Thijs, himself a prominent and experienced director, is published by Toneelgroep Amsterdam so that the interested spectator can buy it before or after seeing the performance. It is the first time, van Hove told me, more proud than ashamed, that Mourning Becomes Electra, the play that more than any other helped to get O'Neill the Nobel Prize, is published in Dutch. The translation both reads and plays well. But of course there are now and then untranslatable words or passages, as when Seth, the gardener, at the end "pretending to search the ground" says: "Left my clippers around somewheres." He is obviously referring not so much to the garden tool as to the clipper ships which, together with the South Sea islands, stand for the longing for release that characterizes the Mannons as representatives of Man. This reference is not, and cannot be, carried over into the Dutch translation.
Van Hove denies that he has any concrete plans for a new O'Neill production. Early plays like The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape do not interest him particularly, although he can value them as testaments to O'Neill's wide thematic and formal range. But he would very much like to stage The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten or Strange Interlude. And while the troubles around A Touch of the Poet have given him cold feet and made him shy away from that play, he would not mind doing Desire Under the Elms again, in a different way. There is hope that sooner or later he will launch another O'Neill on the stage. Which one, when and where, remains to be seen.
New York Times
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December 4, 2008
THEATER REVIEW | Opening Night
A Natural Cassavetes Woman, Theatricalized, Magnified and Multiplied
By Ben Brantley
The walls come tumbling down in Opening Night, Ivo van Hove's wild and woolly stage version of the 1977 John Cassavetes movie about a Broadway-bound play in crisis. It's not just the fabled, much-chipped-away fourth wall—the invisible barrier between actors and audience—that collapses at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where this exhilaratingly acted, Dutch-speaking production from Toneelgroep Amsterdam and NTGent runs through Saturday as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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