As if plans for their next show, Phedre, and touring plans for other shows weren't keeping the company busy enough, Wooster Group have put the finishing touches on their video version of one of their most popular productions, The Emperor Jones. Two benefit screenings of the video will be held Oct. 30 to raise money for the group's "gas plasma monitors" -- new television screens that will be used in Phedre and replace the TV monitors that have become a signature style-point of Wooster Group productions.
The last Wooster Group production, a revival of North Atlantic, completely sold out its autumn 1999 run and returned for a winter 2000 re-mount at the company's home, the 99-seat Performing Garage. Veteran members Dafoe (filmdom's "Light Sleeper" and "The Last Temptation of Christ") and Valk were in the original mounting of North Atlantic in 1984 and returned again for that production.
Other Wooster Group productions include The Hairy Ape (1995), House/Lights (1998) and Brace Up! (1991). In 1991, the troupe won an Obie for 15 years of sustained excellence. That same year, director LeCompte received an NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theatre. In 1995, LeCompte received the MacArthur "genius" grant for her work with The Wooster Group.
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Wooster Group’s next offering will again twist circuitously through literature by adapting Racine's Phedre, itself modeled after Euripides' Hippolytus. Due for a work-in progress staging in spring 2001, the as-yet-untitled work will be "a soap opera of confessions and confrontations set against a torrid backdrop of Christian and Greek mythology." Paul Schmidt, who adapted the Chekhov piece (Brace Up!) as well as created the troupe's 1994 Fish Story, has done the translation for Phedre, about a young man spurning advances from his stepmother, not because he's promised elsewhere but because he, too, is pining for someone else. (As ever with Greek-myth drama, through it all, the gods have their own agenda.) Veteran company members Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk are among those rehearsing Phedre, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte.
Reached by phone on the first day of rehearsals (Sept. 11), assistant director Richard Kimmel told Playbill On-Line the show would have "a very American vernacular, stripped to the guts. It's poetic but not rhyming verse. We're toying around with badminton and ping-pong, lots of racquet sports. David Linton is working on music for the show, while also Kate [Valk] has been working with Suzzy Roche and Koosil-ja Hawang coming up with girl-band type rock songs. Yes, Phedre sings... Jim Findlay's set is extremely exciting and new, rather than a rearrangement of the previous one." Asked how the latest project came about, Kimmel said, "We were commissioned to make a radio play for the BBC, which aired in June, so we've been working on Phedre for some time already."
Like most Wooster Group efforts, Phedre will have a long gestation period and likely not see an official opening for at least a year. "We'll rehearse for two months," Kimmel said, "then we start a fall tour of our last show, North Atlantic. Then we'll work on it so more before bringing House/Lights to France in March."
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-- By David Lefkowitz
