The short brick building that crouches at 33 Wooster Street is known to be a haunted house. How could it not be? For this is the location of the Performing Garage, home for nearly half a century to that most storied of experimental theater troupes in New York, the Wooster Group.
Performers who have acquired legendary status both among the exacting aesthetes of downtown Manhattan (Ron Vawter, Kate Valk) and on a more far-reaching level (Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray) have acted, acted out, danced, got high, stripped down, camped out, built sets, trashed sets, fallen in and out of love, and recorded and videotaped one another exhaustively in the Garage’s small but exceedingly fertile space.
As for the shows themselves — usually overseen by the group’s ever-present, ever-elusive artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte — they have always had a touch of the numinous. Bending, mixing and exploding genres and media, they dissolve the boundaries between high and low, hazy memory and hard facts, reality and its representations and, yes, the living and the dead.
Classic writers — Chekhov, Racine, Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein — have been resurrected in conversation with a tumultuous, shape-shifting present for an astonishing 50 years. When I first arrived in New York in the late 1970s, these shows — which played to select audiences of 100 or less — were the ones that the coolest of experimental theatergoers swooned over, gossiped about and pretended to have seen even if they hadn’t. (I can’t be on lower Wooster Street today without walking into vaporous memories of Valk and Dafoe eerily channeling and transforming O’Neill in “The Hairy Ape,” or Valk splintering into multiple simulcast selves as a soulless, preternatural femme fatale in “House/Lights.”)
With its latest production, “Nayatt School Redux,” the group has trained its retrospective lens on itself — specifically on a play first staged at the Garage in 1978. (This reincarnation, which runs through Saturday, is completely sold out.) The result, its creators agree, is a kind of a séance.
That this remembrance of days past coincides with the 50th anniversary of the group is strictly happenstance, they insist. “We don’t tell our age,” Valk said, in a Lady Bracknell voice, when I met with her and LeCompte two days after I saw the show. Nor should this “reaction” (the company’s new term for what they do) be regarded as a nostalgic exercise.
“Sentiment for me is always cut by an irony, which I have in my bones,” LeCompte said. She added that even when she’s watching the piece — and she attends every single performance — “I’m not sentimental about any of the characters. I’m just seeing it new.”
Valk, 68, admitted to softer feelings. Now a regular director for the group as well as its enduring leading lady, she first appeared as a Wooster performer in the original “Nayatt.” She said of her early days with the group, “It was when I found it,” she said, referring to a commitment to theater that feels like a religious calling, “when I didn’t know that I would find it. And it was so incredible.”
LeCompte: “See, I didn’t have any feeling of that at the time.”
Valk: “I was just in love.”
LeCompte: “See, I was not in love.”
Of the team from the original “Nayatt School,” which mixes a free-form Gray soliloquy with T.S. Eliot’s gnomic play “The Cocktail Party,” only LeCompte (its director), Valk (its central performer) and the filmmaker Ken Kobland are active participants in its resurrection here.
But with the aid of a half-decayed video recording of a performance in Amsterdam, a few vinyl albums, assorted monitors and a cast that seems to straddle a great divide, all the major players from 47 years ago are present and accounted for.
They are also well represented by talismanic objects: the weathered briefcase in which Gray kept his records; the frame of a tent that was part of the scenery; the recording of “The Cocktail Party” that Gray checked out from the New York Public Library and never returned; and the immortal, flaking pink chair, which LeCompte picked up on the street and which started showing up in the group’s productions with “Nayatt.” It achieved its own moment of apotheosis in the 2017 play titled “A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique).”
Gray — who would go on to become a celebrated film actor and monologuist before taking his own life in 2004 — is the most elaborately represented member of the original “Nayatt” cast. (Ari Fliakos reincarnates Vawter, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994.) Gray’s words and gestures are replicated, as much as the distortions of old tapes allow, by two stand-ins: that fine actor and Wooster member Scott Shepherd, who plays Gray playing a psychiatrist in “The Cocktail Party,” and Valk, who becomes Gray as he riffs about his personal connection to the Eliot work.
This is achieved by the use of headsets, which allow the actors to sync their speech with that of whom they’re listening to. “I’ve learned so much from Spalding,” said Valk, who marvels at his timing. “I did when he was alive, too.” It feels right that Valk discovered that the “Nayatt” tape seems to overlay a slightly older recording of “Rumstick Road,” an earlier Wooster work centered on the suicide of Gray’s mother.
At moments, she can detect beneath Gray’s perorations the faint, high-pitched sound of the actor Libby Howes screaming, while being tickled in a diabolical doctor sketch. Howes, who once spent her nights in the Garage while homeless people occupied her apartment, figures memorably in the monologue with which Valk introduces “Nayatt School Redux.” When Howes left the original “Nayatt” (that was after Valk had taken her to Bellevue Hospital), it was Valk who replaced her.
“Classic theater story,” Valk says in the current production, with the glimmer of a deadpan smile.
AS A CRITIC for The New York Times, I had written about the Wooster Group for a quarter-century. But I had never met either Valk or LeCompte before I joined them one misty Monday morning in LeCompte’s loft, a script’s throw from the Garage. Artworks by Alex Katz and Joan Jonas (who appeared in the original “Nayatt” and is channeled by Maura Tierney) are on the walls of the sleeping area; so is the floor from the Wooster’s “Emperor Jones,” marked with Valk’s boot prints and stage blood. (LeCompte has lived in that building — first with her former partners, Gray and then Dafoe — since the 1970s.)
Of course, I recognized Valk, one of my favorite actresses, whose heavy-lidded eyes and bowed mouth bring to mind tough but winsome Hollywood stars of the 1930s, like Sylvia Sidney; seeing her on the street had always been for me like spotting Garbo. But I realized that for years I had been mistaking another member of the troupe for LeCompte.
Usually addressed as Liz, LeCompte cherishes the idea of being invisible. With her blonde-gray hair in a ponytail, her lean form and symmetrical, sibylline face bearing scant evidence of her 80 years, she is a paradoxical blend of penetrating scrutiny and willed withdrawal.
She said she is bewildered when a reference to her in Valk’s opening monologue in “Nayatt” draws laughter. That’s when Valk says that in her early tongue-tied days of working with the group, she gravitated toward LeCompte because “she seemed to be in charge.”
LeCompte: “Why do they laugh there?”
Valk: “Because people know you. And that’s amazing to me, because I didn’t think people knew you.”
LeCompte: “But do I seem in charge?”
Valk remembered when, during early rehearsals for the original “Nayatt,” LeCompte exploded at Gray, with whom she lived at the time: “You said to Spalding, ‘I refuse to be the nucleus of this group, all the time. Why do I have to be the nucleus? Can’t you do it for a while?’”
But there’s no denying that while the Wooster Group identifies as a hierarchy-free creative collective, it is LeCompte’s specific vision that makes each of its productions so singular. And it is, above all, what has made the troupe the most lauded and laureled of experimental companies of its generation. It was recently announced that, in May, LeCompte will receive the Venice Biennale’s lifetime achievement award for theater.
Defining that vision has never been easy. LeCompte sees her perspective as largely that of a painter. She also, reluctantly, compares the process to archaeology and the work of architects “who would take older buildings and not tear them down, but change them in some way, that wasn’t just imitating what had originally been but that transformed them in some way.”
“We keep figuring out what to call these things,” she continued. “And I’ve finally found the word: It’s a reaction. And you have to go to the secondary meanings.” (These include “a chemical process in which two or more substances act mutually on each other and are changed into different substances.”)
Valk said she likes “reaction” because “it’s more immediate and it doesn’t infer that we have some power or control over it; it’s a re-examination. We don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s more like a chemical reaction. And it’s spiritual for us.”
The physical nature of these reactions has necessarily changed in the post-Covid years, with the shrinking of grants and donations and possibilities for touring. Though they continue to characterize their productions as perpetual works in progress, LeCompte said they no longer have the luxury of spending years on a single piece. Nor could they afford to put on “House/Lights” these days, with its elaborate, high-tech maze of a set.
Valk: “I like to say that Liz went from steel to aluminum to cardboard.”
Cardboard figures prominently in another recent Wooster production, the one they will be taking to Venice in May. That’s “Symphony of Rats,” a 1988 play by Richard Foreman, which portrays an American president in a metaphysical (and physical) state of decay.
Directed by Valk (who had appeared for Foreman in the original production) and LeCompte, “Rats” marks the first time the group has reinterpreted the work of another experimental auteur. “We were facing that time where we were asking, ‘Whose story can we tell?’” Valk said. “And then I was like —” she gave an “aha” gasp: “He’s the grandfather and we’re the grandmothers. Richard will let us do anything we want.”
Foreman died in January, at 87. But he did get to see the Wooster revival of “Rats” last year. By that time, like the president in the play, he was in a wheelchair and visibly ailing.
A sense of life’s transience, particularly as it’s embodied by theater, has always pervaded Wooster productions. With their “reactions” to their own work — and they’ll next be tackling their notorious “L.S.D. (…Just the High Points”), which drew the ire of Arthur Miller for its use of “The Crucible” in the mid-1980s — the erosive distortions of time have been magnified in newly poignant ways.
Valk said that after a recent performance of “Nayatt,” “Kids came up and said, ‘Did you really live in the theater, or did you make that up?’”
She added, with classic Wooster-style drollery, that now, “We’re mythologizing ourselves. We’re not going to wait for you. We’re just going to go ahead and do it.”
“Yeah,” LeCompte added. “We gave up on you guys. Everything — you got to do it yourself.”
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