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The Wooster Group's performance of
The Emperor Jones
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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 Camlias" 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
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March 27, 2006
The Empress Jones
The Wooster Group plays with race and gender in ONeills 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 fathers 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 childrentestaments 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 countrys premier poet of the water, the New York-born playwright Eugene ONeill (1888-
1953) confined a number of his doomed, anxious characters to boats and islandsrelatively
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 ONeills 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 Groups current production of ONeills 1920
expressionistic The Emperor Jones (at St. Anns Warehouse), the astonishing Kate Valk plays
the title charactera tall, powerfully built, full-blooded negro of middle agein blackface.
Formerly a Pullman porter, Brutus Jones travels to an unnamed island in the Caribbean as a
stowaway; he becomes the islands emperor when some bush niggers see him dodge a bullet
in a showdown with another manan 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, Deres little stealin like you does, and
deres 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 deys one thing I learns in
ten years on de Pullman cas listenin to de white quality talk, its 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; hes a gatherer of prey.
Nowhere in the definitive 1962 biography ONeill 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 ONeills oeuvre is Joe Mott, in the 1939 play The Iceman Cometh.) But we
do know that ONeill was particularly taken with the marginalizedwith 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 nowValk speaks in
a different register as she pronounces the des, dems, and dats that pepper Joness
speechLeCompte also addresses the long-standing controversy surrounding the text. Charles
Gilpin was the first Brutus Jones, when the play premired, 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 ONeills interracial,
bourgeois-minded drama All Gods 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 ONeill 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 theyre to work at all. LeCompte doesnt
comment on the racism of ONeills 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 mans 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 ONeill proposed for Joneslight 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 ONeills 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 Joness 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. Its a shock to see her at first. The full historical horror of her presentation is heightened
by Smitherss snide voice (hes the more female character here) and by the distant music and
electronic beeps that punctuate Joness speecha 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
Valks white shirtfront, the gesture speaks louder than all the words that have cascaded from her
mouth.
LeComptes condensed version of The Emperor Jones, which lasts a shattering sixty minutes,
acts as a kind of coda to the Wooster Groups 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 premire of Route 1 & 9, the National
Endowment for the Arts revoked the Wooster Groups funding. And one can see why: the
Groups 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 ONeills 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 ONeills: they show
us the sea of deception and pretense we all swim in, while searching for the self that is waiting
there at the waters edge, if only we could see it..
Time Out New York
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Issue 546 : Mar 1622, 2006
The Emperor Jones
By Eugene ONeill. Dir. Elizabeth LeCompte. With Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos.
St. Anns Warehouse
By David Cote
When I saw the Wooster Groups 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.
Lets hope the staff at St. Anns 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 others
shoes. But race wont 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 ONeill role, the performer exploits the tropes of
minstrelsypuckering lips, rolling eyes, braying wide-mouthed laughwhile 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 Joness progression from escaped
U.S. convict and West Indian dictator to deposed ruler hunted by his people. While it helps to
read ONeills play beforehand, there is a useful synopsis in the program. The action isnt hard to
follow, once your brain adjusts to LeComptes neuron-popping dramaturgy.
A CurtainUp Review
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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
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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 StadiumJune 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 didnt 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
doesnt excuse anything when he loses. He says, It was just one of those gamesyou 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
21 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 scne, 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 Steins Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights meets a sixties lesbian S &
M cult flick called Olgas House of Shame. Or her newest project, La Didone, in which
Francesco Cavallis 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. Jeters a
great player, but hes 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 isnt 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
LeComptes work, and on the theories of theatre that have led her to deconstruct or dissect a
playto 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-gardeRichard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter
Sellars among themdescribe 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 anythingIm 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 yearmost
notably Kate Valk, a fifty-year-old actress who is one of the groups 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 LeComptes 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!LeComptes Phdre, transported from Racines Peloponnesian court to a badminton
court on the stage of St. Anns 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 subvertit
was like being reborn into a new life. I loved it. But I discovered that I was definitely a
freelancer. I couldnt 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 Id been a majoretteI could twirl a
badminton racquet. The worst was I couldnt function with that earwiggy thingshe means an
earphonethat Liz makes everybody wear. Shes 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 cant 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, its not natural; its 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 LeComptes
female star and closest friend), put the experience this way: Liz shy? Liz fragile? Dont 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
shes the person who is servingnot herself but this huge vision. Her imagination is one huge,
fertile playground, and for her, with actors, theres really only one question: How far can you go,
whats available to you, as a performer? Shes 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 dont want illustration. Theatre isnt illustrative.
Theatre is Katie as Emperor Jonesa role that Valk reprised last year, in the groups revival of
a nineties production of the ONeill playand 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, its
Ah!its an epiphany. I say this because Im never sure of what that is, starting out. And I
really dont 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
dAutomne, 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. Anns 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 Spainthe 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
Burtons Hamlet. This is the look of a LeCompte production just before the world in her
aluminum frame splinters into action and refractioninto 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 1964an
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 themI have the visual idea right awayand fill them. I
bide my time and I dont move on very quickly. With a play, its 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 minds 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 LeComptes imagination, put it
this way: Liz directs with her eyes. She sees thoughts, sees ideas. Thats 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 nextand 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 collageshell put things on the table and say, Here, entertain me,
and then kind of disappear. But then shell 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, selfishshe was a cheerleader; she had boyfriendsand
always a little angry, but she was also very protective. She said, We shared a bedroom, and, in
that volatile household, shed tell me stories at night to calm me down. And she was a stand-up
person. I liked that best about her. You dont 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 gamesshe was the only girl
on her junior-high softball teamthough not as much as she now likes watching figure skating,
where theyre 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 dont 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 folksingersBob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie among
themand, 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 ingnues. So the ingnue was me. Her first play was
called The Constant Lover, after the John Suckling poem; her second was Camuss Caligula.
I had trouble learning the lines, she says. He didnt mind. Just sit there, he said, and wear
these clothes. One of the handsome young men was the actor Spalding Gray. He was twentyfour
thencapricious, 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 rsum. The director Richard Schechner, whose company, the Performance Group, was
installed in the building on Wooster Street that LeComptes company owns now, discovered the
rsum in 1969, during a casting crisis for a retelling of MacbethMacduff had quit to play
Mr. Peanut in the Planters commercialsand 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 Schechners 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 Shepards
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 doctors 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 Schechners own talents were, by his admission, fairly scattered. He wrote books
about theatre. He was interested in performance theoryhe teaches performance art at N.Y.U.
nowand in the anthropology of theatre. In 1974, LeCompte and Gray formed a kind of
company within Schechners company, working together on Sakonnet Pointthe first play in
the trilogy about Grays troubled childhood and his mothers 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, Lizs star was
ascendant, and that meant Exit Richard. LeCompte says, Im extremely competitive. In a
group, theres only one leader, and if youre the one you dont have to compete, youre free.
Sakonnet Point opened at the Garage in 1975 and made downtown theatre history. It wasnt a
monologue, like Spalding Grays later pieces. It was the first of LeComptes downloadingsan
acting out of the thoughts and people and confusions in Grays head. LeCompte often uses the
word framing to describe her work: I hook into peoples dreams about themselves. I make a
frame for them. I get to know them. I say, Oh, lets find a way to give them back to you. It
wasnt that I had this thing about wanting to be a director. I said to Spalding, Ill 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 wasnt as confident as Spalding. He gave me that confidence because
I could stand behind him. I didnt 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 Schechners production of Jean Genets The Balcony. Gray
later described the breakup to a reporter this way: Whenever wed play Monopoly, shed 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 Dafoea public-policy researcher, three years out of Yale,
who has his fathers face and his mothers piercing curiositytold me, Liz still spends a certain
amount of time hiding herself. I think she was always confident, but maybe she didnt think that
as a woman she could do thatstep 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
exitsa 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 archivistthe 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 Scorseses 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
LeComptes hands, and, while they battled famously at rehearsalshe is eleven years younger
than she is, and their friends say he wanted all her attentionhis 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.
LeComptes 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 bringa book or a picture or a piece
of music or, for that matter, a piece of clothingand 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.
Shes 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. Its not an intellectual figuring out. Im not a traditional director. I dont 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., lets do it!
Shepherd has a pale, handsome face, wiry red hair, and a long, agile athletes 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 Dafoes shooting schedule. Fliakos, who plays
Claudius to Shepherds 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 Valks
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 Hamlets 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 disturbor, as
she puts it, to surprisereality. 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. Its not ambiguous, like film; I can feel the surface.
LeCompte had never directed Shakespeare before she took on Hamlet. But she had seen
Richard Burtons 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 Taylorshe had my nameand, 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 dobring things together. I take something, I copy it, and maybe somethings
revealed thats not in the original. I go for that. Its 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 panicthough 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 wasnt a celebrity picture, she says. I liked it. I looked eighty, from the Ozarks. I
looked like I was dying. A college friend I hadnt heard from in twenty years saw it and called
and said, Liz, are you all right?
In a way, LeComptes 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 didnt 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 Wilders 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 citys 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 Millers play about the Salem
witch trials.
Miller was the same generation as my fathercheap, 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 wouldnt 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, Ive had a very bad cooking
accident. How could I say, Mr. Miller, its 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 couldnt 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, its me doing the inviting, inviting you into my living room,
she told me at breakfast, the day after the Paris Hamlet opening. If you dont like it, then its
just a bad party for you, nothing more. But, on tour, Im selling a product. I have to please the
people who are paying us to come, and I dont work for that. If Im rejected, its no fun, and, if I
do well, then Im pumped up in a way I dont like, either. It used to be a hallmark of
LeComptes productions that some of the audience would walk out, furious or bewildered, in the
middle of opening nightif they were not actually flinging vegetables at the stage. (Id sit there
with them. Theyd throw the vegetables, and Id go, Yeah! Right!, so they wouldnt 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. Theyre 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 doesnt
understand.
LeComptes 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 readthere were three translations of Dostoyevskys The Possessed by her bed
when she started rehearsing Hamletand 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 shes tired, or that she cant 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 dont know if I can do this. Ross, by her
account, was quietly freaking out when SpuddySpalding Grayintervened. 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, Lets go. ) But the pressures have grown with the company,
with its reputation, and with the cost and size and technological complexity of LeComptes
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 Whos 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 couldnt step on the bathroom
floorI had to wash itand 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 cant translate from his English. It seemed like a fetish to me, because I always see texts
as objects. They have a solidityits not theoreticaland I dont 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 doesnt remember when), she added a sweep of battlefield footage from Grigori
Kozintsevs great Russian Hamlet. She toyed with the idea of slipping in a bit of Mel Gibsons
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 Spooners hands and told him to go ahead, croon
some lines. By the time of the St. Anns 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
playin 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, its not the character; its the language, she told me, the last time we talked
about the play. Its the words that hold everything together.
I used to get mad at my plays, but its different now, she said. This thing, the theatre, it isnt
necessary to me. My fears are about dying, and not being loved. You know what I want? I want a
dog. A dog whos 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? Im guilty even feeling that way. Well, not so
much guilty but anxious. And nowall the work Im doingIm not even anxious, because I
know I could walk away. I see my friend Alex Katz, painting, paintingprobably hell die
painting. Oh, move over here, I say. Tell me your secret. But my actors are happy. Ive given
them something, and theyre entertaining me. Its like downhill skiing. You go whoosh! And if
you dont get there you do it again. Its not one moment, or one performance. Its Will I make it
at the end of the day? .
The New York Times
Top
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.