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"Poor Theater" closed in late December, 2004. Jessica Slote files this reflection. Poor Theater, a Series of Simulacra, the latest production of the Wooster Group, is an annoying provocation from the start. The play's title is taken from Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish theater director whose post-war (WWII) work swept the theater world of the 1960s. Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory theater, which he founded, developed what he called "poor theater." It eschewed fancy sets and technology, making the case instead that the actor -- the actor's body, face, and voice -- is the main tool of the theater. Grotowski developed intensely demanding techniques of training and preparation and his productions were known for their extraordinary power and energy. At the outset of this Poor Theater, technicians wheel a large screen into the middle of the Wooster Group's famous garage-for this production the playing space is otherwise empty. Then the audience must settle in and watch a video of Wooster Group actors watching a video about Grotowski's famous theater company. We are treated to this for some time. Many people in the audience laughed when this or that Wooster member-intently watching the Polish actors in rehearsal on film-mimicked a movement, turning a hand or foot. This laughter felt like the first curious signpost on the highway. What exactly were they laughing at? The laughter was very comfortable -- appreciative, . similar to the laughter you hear on a sitcom laugh track, when familiar and beloved characters -- people who almost seem like family members -- betray some little lovable quirk or idiosyncracy. It was not the full house laughter at the climax of a carefully orchestrated plotline, but the spotty, knowing chuckles -- made by only a few people in the house, the insiders who know the series, the actors, and the characters, best, who get the inside joke before the rest of us can appreciate what is going on. When Wooster actors appear in the playing space, they explain that they visited the Grotowski studio in Poland in preparation for their work on this piece. They simulate (reenact) their visit to the studio, (which they secretly recorded (?), they say). Kate Valk plays the Polish tour guide, complete with Polish accent, answering Wooster members' questions. One Wooster actor had visited the original laboratory in the 60s and tries to reconcile her memories of it with the current space. Were there windows then? She doesn't remember a parquet floor. The parquet floor was installed for Grotowski in his later years, the tour guide explains. In the old days, there was no parquet floor. It was very simple (poor). The parquet floor becomes an obsession for one Wooster member (Sheena See) and apparently also for the company. We are treated to video footage of the building of an identical parquet floor in the Wooster workshop and a detailed description of how it was installed in the Wooster space, along the same directional lines as the original. The program includes a diagram of the "footprint of Theater Laboratorium in Wroclaw, Poland within The Performing Garage." The night we were there, the playing space had no parquet floor, but this was left unexplained. Perhaps this was a simulation within a simulation? Since that moment in time when the towers collapsed, we have all become obsessed with footprints-how to honor, commemorate, preserve, and leave space for things from the past, which are missing. Nonetheless, at least one member of the audience was rendered explosively restless by the video of the Wooster Group's tech department lovingly, meticulously, (expensively?) building of an exact replication of the parquet floor that Grotowski apparently had installed for himself in his later years in Poland, and the fitting of this replication as a footprint in the Wooster's Group's garage. The audience gave this video footage perfect, almost breathless, rapt attention. In addition, we were told, Wooster technicians built two window-sized screens, mounted on large steel easels-which indeed were in place upstage-to simulate two windows in the Polish Theater Laboratory where technicians sat. The Wooster screens present live video hook up of two real Wooster technicians who sit to the audience's right on a large scaffold in plain view. At all times, we can see the technicians' faces on the screens, or look over at the technicians themselves. A little tense exchange between (a Wooster actress playing) a Wooster actress who visited the Grotowski Theater in the 60s and (the Wooster actress playing) the Polish tour guide who was herself a Grotowski company member at that time affords the audience a few more (odd) laughs. The tension between the two actresses seems palpable. They practice some oneupmanship on each other about who has the more authentic memory, the woman who visited forty years ago, or the woman who was part of the company forty years ago. Although one viewer thought the visiting actress exhibited a lot of, well, what might be called American-flavored condescension, the audience finds this exchange funny. The yuks that come in here again seem like some kind of strange (unsolicited) smug complicity again with --what??? The Polish actress gets defensive when the American actress is condescendingly critical about that parquet floor. The latter insists: "That's not poor. In America, only rich people have parquet floors." The Wooster actress playing the Polish tour guide counters that the parquet floor was installed for Grotowski himself in later years when he worked here alone. Likewise with the windows. In the early days, there were no windows. It was pretty poor. The reenactment of the (secretly recorded!) tour-guide assisted visit to Grotowski's latter-day studio has all the dramatic power of getting into the VIP room with some of the celebrities and being privileged to watch them hang out together. Yet, the audience treats this segment with reverent and intense interest. Why? Because it is the famous Wooster Group visiting the famous Grotowski? There was a feeling at this point that the audience had-unbeknownst to itself-without the slightest doubt or question-surrendered its disbelief and accepted the emperor's new clothes proposition-that what we were watching was important and interesting. (Hey, this hilarious little "best-kept secret" is a modus operandi in myriad shows and performances.) ******* Later, back at home (we are told), Wooster Group members watched a video of a Grotowski company production, and a Polish translator watched with them. The Wooster Group reenacts this occasion too-which they also taped. This time, another Wooster actor plays the Polish translator. His meticulous devotion to accurately rendering each line spoken in the Polish show, and the attitudes of the Wooster actors towards the translator's labors -- he calls for the tape to be stopped at every sentence, sometimes at every phrase -- elicits more odd laughter from the audience. Some Wooster actors hang on every word; one seems bored and impatient. In the final scene of this first simulacrum of the evening, we are told that the Wooster group members will re-enact the last scene of the Grotowski play that they have been watching on video. Akropolis, a landmark Grotowski piece, is set in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. On the onstage screen, the last scene of the play is shown. The quality of the film from the 60s is poor -- very grainy black and white, and the image is quite small. Grotowski actors playing prisoners are sporadically visible through a small window as if we are peering into a tiny dark hellish dungeon holding many people. The sound track is dimly heard, but on top of it, Wooster actors jump in and begin to reenact the scene-in what appears to be flawless Polish! This fantastic and utterly unexpected accomplishment relieves the tedium of all the earlier proceedings. It suddenly and unexpectedly catapults us out of the smug realm of cultural tourism into the very real and extraordinary accomplishments that have always been the trademark of Wooster Group actors. (The task of delivering long speeches in Polish-for people who are presumably not Polish-is an extraordinary feat by itself). One actor, Ari Fliakos, gives a powerful rendition of a prisoner's impassioned speech and song. Possibly Polish is a native language for him. It doesn't matter. Kate Valk and Scott Shepherd never miss a beat as they join Fliakos in the final "aria" of the prisoners. The Wooster actors, facing the audience, appear to have an uncanny way of matching word for word and motion for motion what we can also see on screen-a very adept simulation, albeit the live performance takes place in a sort of vacuum-on a empty stage with the actors in street clothes speaking through microphones. The audience can, in effect, switch back and forth between the Polish archival performance on film and the astonishingly accomplished Wooster actors simulating live in their work space. The scene ends in a crescendo of anguish. In the Akropolis film, the Auschwitz "prisoners" are herded off to their fate. The Wooster actors also exit in real time-opening a door in the floor at the foot of the audience and disappearing down, unexpectedly, into the ground on the line "and nothing was left behind but smoke." Their disappearance also, oddly, elicited a laugh from some audience members. In the second simulacrum, a company member (Sheena See) returns to her obsession with Grotowski's parquet floor and we are treated to another videotape of someone making rubbings of the parquet floor's texture while the actress in real-time murmurs through a microphone observations about making the rubbings. The observations are not her own. In fact they are the words of German artist Max Ernst who experimented with collage, photomontage, and surreal images. See speaks Ernst's words while we watch a video of a snowy day in New York. The program lists the scene in the following way: "A Company member pretends to be [Ernst]." The audience again gives this scene patient, obedient, attention-and then is treated to an intermission. ******* In the final simulacrum of the evening, Wooster Group actors "pretend to be members of the Frankfurt Ballet." Scott Shepherd delivers a flawless monologue-the words of Frankfurt Ballet choreographer William Forsythe-on dance and the creative impulse. Simultaneously Shepherd, Valk, and Fliakos hurl themselves about the space-now revealed to be a dance studio floor, with bars at the side. With their eyes trained in the audience's direction, but on something we can't see, the Wooster actors seem to be following some kind of script. It is fascinating and exhilarating to watch the disciplined abandon with which they fly though the air, landing entangled in each other limbs. Shepherd continues to deliver the director's remarks throughout. At one point, apparently in response to a question about improvisation and the extent to which it is "easy"-Shepherd hurls himself through the air and lands entangled in Fliakos' limbs, while responding, "I wish!" This gets a laugh, of course. In fact, this moment is actually funny! In the end, the actors take a break and explain that they are going to treat us to one last bit of "cultural tourism." They come forward and make us aware of video screens fastened to posts just in front of the audience. They turn the screens around so that, now, we can see them. We realize that the script of their dance was (most likely) a video of a production of the Frankfurt Ballet. (For the record: a tenet of poor theater is to reveal the technology of the theater rather than to mask it.) For their last number, however, the "dance company"/actors perform a different script. On the screens that we can now see, and on screens on upstage posts, an old Western starts to play-cowboys, horses, getaways, etc. The actors apply their same serious and-again-astonishing technique to render this bit of Americana as dance. The western begins to be cut with scenes from Akropolis. With incredible and lightening speed and agility, the Wooster actors jump from one simulation into the other and back again-from hokey Hollywood Bushwacked cowboy antics-to Auschwitz. And so the evening ends. ******* The program for the show includes the following note: "Simulacrum: Oxford English Dictionary: 1. A material image, made as a representation of some deity, person or thing. 2. Something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing. 2b. A mere image, a specious imitation or likeness of something. Websters New 20th Century Unabridged: 1. An image. 2. A mere pretense or semblance; vague representation; counterfeit; travesty; sham." ******* Walking through the nightstreets of upscale Soho after the show, it was the curious audience reactions to different parts of the simulation that continued to cry out for examination. Of course, an audience's reaction will vary from performance to performance. That's theater. All the same, when people laughed, what were they laughing at? Did
we understand all the levels of simulation at once, from the outset?
(No.) In these times, it bears serious thinking. In fact, it's no joking matter, folks. Thank the Wooster Group for taking us on this tour of our own self-made, self-inflicted confusion. Poor
Theater by The Wooster Group was seen at The Performing Garage,
in December, 2004. Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
