A stroll down Wooster Street in the neighbourhood that New Yorkers call "SoHo" can turn out to be a lesson in urban archaeology, especially on an Indian summer afternoon when golden light pries the gaze from the sidewalk. On my way to the Performing Garage, home for nearly three decades to the offbeat Wooster Group theatre company, I pass former factories that were colonised by artists in the 1970s, then carved into sleek boutiques as Wall Street money washed across the neighbourhood in the decades since. I'm thinking , "It's all so heartless, this capitalist game", when my eyes fall upon on a pungent reminder of the street's gritty past: there on the cobblestone street, a tidy pile of human waste.
To the Wooster Group's founding director, Elizabeth LeCompte, who shares a large loft apartment in the area with her husband, movie star Willem Defoe, such a sight is no surprise. "This part of town is more seedy than ever," says LeCompte, 53, widely recognised as a leader of the America's dwindling avant garde. But to her, "seedy" means Yuppie shoppers, not bums or bohemians. "This used to be a lovely place, very quiet," she says of the old days.
"There were industrial buildings, peppered with artists' lofts, where people were living basically illegally. There were no street lights. There was nothing. A bar on the corner that catered to truckers. But slowly, as you can see, that has changed."
Elizabeth LeCompte, however, has not. Since 1975, the Wooster Group's fractured stagings of theatrical classics - Thornton Wilder's Our Town mixed with skits, in "blackface" make-up, from African-American vaudevillian Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham have been among New York's most challenging nights at the theatre, as likely to disgust as delight.
Audiences regularly fill the troupe's 110-seat Performing Garage, where the stage is designed according to the precepts of Japanese Noh drama, although it sprouts a pygmy forest of microphones and TV monitors. Critics, however, have been so consistently unkind that LeCompte, in a signature bit of prickliness, once effectively shut them out for several seasons in a row. "I'm pragmatic," she says. "If I'm filling up the house, I don't want a bad review to keep people away. If not, then I'll invite the critics as a last resort."
She has also boldly admitted to reporters that she makes use of her famous husband, who remains a committed member of her quirky troupe despite his current asking-price of $2 million per film, to pack the house for spectacles in which spoken text, odd sound bites and Kabuki-inspired dance compete for attention on the stage. Yet when I ask this 1995 winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant why she has chosen Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic tragedy The Emperor Jones for The Wooster Group's Irish debut at the Belfast Festival , she stumbles for an answer: "We wanted to bring O'Neill, the son of an Irishman, back to where I think the roots of his language are," she replies.
What attracted you to the play?
"I really couldn't say."
How long has it interested you?
"I don't know."
"Are you typically drawn to a text, or by an idea of how to stage it."
"There is no typical . . ." She pauses. "I don't know."
In the end, LeCompte's discomfort proves rather refreshing. She is a confirmed outsider who calls the million-dollar productions of Broadway "real" theatre and rarely makes time to view them. Her credits include having shaped the careers of several noted actors who have since found success in the mainstream, including Defoe (Mississippi Burning, The English Patient), the late Ron Vawter (Philadelphia) and the monologist Spalding Gray, with whom she moved to New York shortly after graduating from Skidmore College, with a degree in painting, in 1969. Together they forged the company from the ashes of a previous ensemble, although today Gray and LeCompte are one of the city's famous feuding couples; a wall separates their apartments in the same building, but their creative collaboration ended years ago.
PERHAPS alone among prominent directors here, LeCompte has not hesitated to raise the most difficult of American topics: race. In 1981 the company lost critical funding from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1983 after council members construed the Wooster Group's use of "blackface" makeup and "dem-and-dose" speech in their farcical "Pigmeat" Markham routines to be "harsh and caricatured portrayals of a racial minority."
Caught suddenly in the crosshairs of political correctness, the company refused to back down. As LeCompte said at the time: "My feeling about everything is, if someone says "you can't do that", especially in the theatre, then I want to do it immediately."
Since then the use of "blackface" has become a sort of hallmark of the seven-member troupe, although it is just one of many popular dramatic forms they use. "We ran into all of this a bit innocently since we originally viewed this incredibly rich material with absolute joy and wonder," says LeCompte, who was delighted by "Pigmeat's" inventive and playful dialect. "But the reaction to our performance was so revealing of how big this taboo was in our culture. We just had to run with it."
With The Emperor Jones, they return to the controversy once again. O'Neill's tragic hero is Brutus Jones, a black train porter who has killed a white man over a game of dice and fled to a Caribbean island, where he has somehow cajoled the population into accepting him as their leader.
Based on a true incident, the piece follows Jones (played by longtime company member Kate Valk) and his Cockney accomplice Smithers (Paul Lazar) as the islanders rise up against their despot, pushing him deeper and deeper into the forest with the haunting and hypnotic beating of their drums.
The highly stylised play was an immediate cause celebre when it opened in the autumn of 1920 at a small house not far from Wooster Street. In it, perhaps for the first time on the American stage, a black actor took centre stage in a serious entertainment for whites; Paul Robeson also got rare top billing, for a black actor, in the Hollywood hit version in 1933. Yet the work poses problems in the age of political correctness, for its characters utter words that we consider racist today, including "nigger", and the plot-line is easily read as a parable of African-American achievement in reverse: a civilized hero who falls from power is driven back to the jungle and betrayed by a white subordinate.
Now, Valk, whose female Brutus Jones, in "blackface" makeup, was described by the New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley as "uncommonly powerful and imaginative" when the play opened last March, says she is convinced that hers is the only company in the country that can successfully stage such a work. The key is the Wooster Group's use of techniques and props that takes the language out of the realm of the literal, she says. "I think the language is problematic because in this country, our culture, is so concerned with naturalism," says Valk. "It's the reason we have made such great films, yet why so much of our theatre remains imitative of European style. In our production we're jamming so many circuits that I think people can see the language as having content, yes, but also music and deep emotion."
Inevitably, all that jammed circuitry will wear on the sensibilities of some in the audience, as when The Wooster Group presented lines from Arthur Miller's beloved The Crucible in barely recognizable, high-speed bursts within a larger work titled L.S.D. that was allegedly based on a group acid trip. Miller, who had denied LeCompte's request to use the play, was so incensed at the "mangling" of his text that he ordered his lawyers to block future productions of the work.
To LeCompte, it was another reminder that the essence of theatre is in conflict. "Years ago somebody came by the theatre and did a personality test to determine your career skills," she says. "I think I scored a minus two per cent on the avoiding conflect section,' she laughs. "He told me to join the forest rangers, so I could live alone in a cabin." Instead, she decided to stay on Wooster Street.
The Emperor Jones runs at the BT Studio from November 20th-24th at 8 p.m.
