What happens when an avant-garde becomes history? The question came to mind during the opening weekend of the Venice Theater Biennale, newly under the direction of Willem Dafoe.
As a co-founder in 1980 of the New York City-based Wooster Group, Dafoe had a front-row view of the experimental theater of his time. In Venice, he is turning the spotlight back onto it — at the risk of the event turning nostalgic.
This year’s edition is a 50th anniversary celebration for an important edition of the Theater Biennale, an annual event put together by the same organization as the (much bigger) Art Biennale. In 1975, the Italian director Luca Ronconi convened a long list of revolutionary American and European ensembles for the theater event, including La MaMa, Odin Teatret, the Living Theater and the Théâtre du Soleil.
Only one of them, Odin Teatret, is actually back this year, but others are being honored through talks and exhibitions. And the Wooster Group, which has its roots in that era, opened the festival on Saturday. The next morning, that company’s longtime director, Elizabeth LeCompte, received the event’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award.
While the Biennale’s lineup also includes younger stars and emerging artists, this year’s historical dive is unusual. Theater festivals tend to be singularly focused on the present, always looking for new and emerging voices. Yet there is value in revisiting the work of artists who had a significant impact on 20th-century stages.
For instance, the Wooster Group’s “Symphony of Rats,” a 2024 production directed by LeCompte and Kate Valk, signals just how prescient the company’s use of technology has been. In this surreal play, written in 1988 by Richard Foreman, a prominent avant-gardist who died in January, a fictional U.S. president is losing his mind. He believes messages are coming to him from outer space, and many of these are manifested onstage through playful video design.
With screens, wire and floating balls dotted around, it looks like the leader — played with complete conviction by Ari Fliakos — is trapped in a mad scientist’s lab. The performers interact seamlessly with the show’s digital elements — a now-ubiquitous feature in contemporary theater, but too often a gimmick.
Yet if you’ve never seen the Wooster Group, or one of Foreman’s plays, it’s not easy to become invested in “Symphony of Rats.” The text’s non sequiturs no longer feel particularly innovative, and they mean the show keeps hitting dead ends, even as it touches on subject matter that feels highly relevant in 2025: a president immersed in a digital landscape in which reality and fantasy increasingly blur. (“Are you into golf, Mr. President, or are you into a very significant hallucination?” one character asks near the start.)
Similarly, “Hamlet’s Clouds” doesn’t make for a thrilling introduction to the Danish company Odin Teatret. There is text in multiple languages, but Odin’s 88-year-old Italian director, Eugenio Barba, clearly doesn’t want the audience to understand it: There are no subtitles. Instead, his seven-member cast retells the story of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” through chanting, prancing, singing, and a tiresome amount of screaming.
It feels like watching a ritual that is clearly meaningful for the people involved, but hardly inclusive. As with the Wooster Group, the sense of novelty is gone — too many have followed in both companies’ footsteps. This speaks to their importance, but lessens their impact; I was left with a sense of respectful appreciation for their craft, rather than of standout theatrical experiences.
It may be that the culture has evolved: Willfully obscured text and zany collages aren’t exactly in fashion these days. Younger directors have learned from experimentations with narrative structure, but have gone back to wanting clearer messages.
Yana Eva Thönnes, a German director born in 1990, is a prime example. Her world premiere at the Biennale, “Call Me Paris,” superbly weaves together two fragmented stories: her own, and Paris Hilton’s. In this self-described “theatrical memoir,” Thönnes recalls how she was nicknamed Paris as a teenager in rural Germany, because she looked like Hilton, and delves into how the misogynistic culture of the 2000s shaped both their lives.
Visually, “Call Me Paris” is both simple and effective: The performers move around a large, hot pink bed, sometimes hiding underneath it when violence lurks. As a striking young blonde, Thönnes — whose youthful eagerness for acceptance is touchingly delivered by Alina Stiegler — draws unwanted sexual attention, which Hilton initially encourages her to enjoy, before revealing the toll that such interest has taken on her. Ruth Rosenfeld portrays a bold, self-aware Hilton, who hones and owns her airhead persona. In that sense, “Call Me Paris” leans into the recent feminist re-evaluation of Hilton’s early life — yet it captures the damage that celebrity culture can wreak on girls, too.
Still, it was another veteran avant-gardist who provided the opening weekend’s most jaw-dropping moment. Romeo Castellucci, 64, may have been too young to take part in the 1975 Biennale, but he has been directing for the stage since the 1980s, and his work is taught in theater history courses. You wouldn’t need to know any of that, however, to appreciate “The Potato Eaters,” his site-specific installation for this edition.
It is set in a former quarantine station on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small, now deserted island in the Venice lagoon. (Special Biennale shuttle boats take you there.) The audience is led by an usher through eerily empty corridors, and in the first few rooms of “The Potato Eaters,” we encounter the unnerving sight of twitching body bags.
In the final room, Castellucci then deploys his visual wizardry to full effect. The lights go down, and in the dark, wind blows furiously at the standing attendees. Then a winged statue materializes under a flickering light, and a woman emerges from one of the body bags, covered in white powder, and speaking in tongues. The scene is enigmatic, yet astounding; when the audience stepped out into the Venice sunshine, we were leaving behind a different, more primal world. Was it experimental? It doesn’t matter. It was a physical experience to remember, here and now.
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