Wooster & Tennessee

The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré is currently playing at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (inconveniently located just west of Times Square). The space is undergoing serious reconstruction -- the elevator only sometimes works, the floor of the main lobby contains about a hundred broken-down cardboard boxes -- and you will feel either like you're walking into a construction zone, or a performance art piece tricked out to resemble a construction zone.

I rarely walk out of a theater work with an unclear reaction to what was going on, but last night left me feeling a little confused. The piece is an adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré, not Williams's best or most interesting play. Add to that the fact that it's already pretty difficult in the present day to present Tennessee Williams unironically anyway. But that appears to have been precisely what the Wooster Group was after. Williams's language is oh so of a moment in history (squalid and poor as hell 1930s New Orleans artistic/gay underworld) and thus can only feel irredeemably stuck in that period, like a string of floating epigrams that stick in the throats of the actors struggling with them. The Wooster Group takes this already existing fact about the play and makes it more so -- the text floats around in chunky bits, a dialogue for lost souls who are hardly hearing one another, or hardly hearing themselves. At best, the result is a delicate quality of tragic self-alienation that makes recourse to a bygone, indirect communication because direct communication just isn't adequate to conveying the complex misery of life. At worst, it's simply parodic. The black maid who drifts in and out of scenes is made to speak in a terrible California Valley girl accent that clashes with Williams's dialect. Like, duh: he done fell down those stairs again, Miss!

Which isn't to say the emotional import of the language is entirely lost from the Wooster play. The characterizations sometimes border on caricature (as with the maid) but all of the roles are so brilliantly acted that even amid the distracting, post-apocalyptic, signature Wooster stage mess, their portrayals seem forced not because of what divides 2012 New York from 1930 New Orleans but for reasons that have to do with self-denial, with the closeted and schizophrenic alienation of these characters from themselves. Add to this the fact that each of the main characters plays multiple characters and is thus in a sense literally schizophrenic. The jerk carnival barker also plays the flamboyant, consumptive queen; the half-blind old mistress of the house is also the not so young anymore Blanche Dubois type living on the second floor. The production and the performers who move it along are all very impressive: the TVs flickering, costumes flying, and entrances and exits timed within a fraction of a second to sound and light cues, voiceovers and projections... But in this case, while it was easy to admire the facility of the operations involved in mounting the show, I'm still not sure what the show underlying all the technical wizardry was actually about. Which is to say, while I'm quite sure I saw a technological masterpiece, I'm not sure what message--however fraught or unstable--that masterpiece was designed to serve. And if there wasn't one, then it was a beautifully wrought frame with absolutely nothing in the center of it.

Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with this. My companion last night, Alexander Overington, is someone who unlike me fully appreciated the technical gadgetry at work and we stuck around post-show to chat up the three men at the rear of the stage sitting at a high table outfitted with Macbooks enough to run the mainframe of the Matrix. From what little I understood of their conversation, which was Greek to me ("...which is where my outboard is connected to Ted's inboard...and he's running the old version of OS9XLS...yeah, exactly, the rear-mounted widescreen feedback loop is wired into the smallscreen mounted on the rear projector...."), their contribution to the show was nothing short of dazzling.