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POOR THEATER: A SERIES OF SIMULACRA. By the Wooster Group. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The Performing Garage, New York City. 6 April 2004.
New York's Wooster Group have long been celebrated for their radical reworkings-or "deconstructions"-of well-known dramatic texts. Most recently, Racine's Phèdre became the occasion for a manic, onstage badminton game in 2002's To You, The Birdie! Their new piece, however, thus far seen only in work-in-progress showings at The Performing Garage, suggests an intriguing new twist on their established approach, in that the texts being cannibalized are themselves the work of performance practitioners, rather than of playwrights. This strategy has laid the groundwork for what may well turn out to be one of the Group's richest performance works to date.
Part one of Poor Theater, as the title suggests, takes on the legend of Jerzy Grotowski's groundbreaking directorial work of the 1960s, by using surviving film documentation of the Polish Laboratory Theatre's production of Akropolis (1962) as the script for a meticulous restaging, in the original Polish, of that piece's closing section. "Our Akropolis" is followed, after a short interval, by part two, in which a very different spin is put on the idea of "poor theater," as the Group reproduce a lecture-demonstration by the American-born, German-based choreographer William Forsythe, whose Ballett Frankfurt-founded by Forsythe in 1984-disbanded in September 2004, when it ceased to receive grant funding from the city of Frankfurt. "For Billy" is followed directly by a brief part three, "Epilogue," in which elements from parts one and two are entwined in a kind of demented reprise, prior to the four performers' sudden disappearance into a hidden trapdoor in the aisle of the seating bank. "And only the smoke remains," comments the voice-over narrative on the Akropolis footage, in which Grotowski's actors have also just disappeared into a trapdoor, representing the entrance to the Auschwitz gas chambers. Heard onstage as a muted background sound, the voice-an echo from the past referencing an absence-makes oddly present for the audience an awareness of what it has just lost.
The notion of the trace, of the absence of things past that inheres in every presence, seems to resonate...