House/Lights
It’s easy to dismiss the Wooster Group’s House/Lights as indulgent art-world posturing. Seven actors careen through 90 disjointed, aloof minutes never betraying an emotion and rarely finishing a thought–when they bother to speak at all. Instead they fling set pieces back and forth, dance drunkenly, pant, whisper, recite bits of a Gertrude Stein text, or imitate video images. Director Elizabeth LeCompte–as though bent on creating the coolest of McLuhan’s cool media–combines video wizardry, an eclectic soundscape heavy on symphonic strains and computer noises, a tangle of microphones that distort performers’ voices, and a slick industrial set that resembles a cross between Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory and the machines at Bally Total Fitness.
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It’s also tempting to indulge in reverse snobbery, as one of New York’s most influential, high-profile experimental companies packs houses in a city of underfunded, underattended fringe performance. Moreover, the Wooster Group in House/Lights has adapted Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights–the same text uber-fringy Doorika grappled with last year in its Chicago swan song, Bathe Me, Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Like the Wooster Group, Doorika forsook all semblance of narrative and employed a bevy of video and audio tricks. But they created an arresting theatrical explosion on a shoestring while the Wooster Group has an annual budget of $750,000 and stars like Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray–how risky can their work be? Hell, Prada provided the men’s suits in this show gratis. Perhaps the New York avant-garde has cashed in its chips.
Whenever Mawra’s film is out of the picture House/Lights displays its brilliance. Then LeCompte’s genius for composition turns the stage into a living organism; bare bulbs flicker and dance while a bank of fluorescents blasts to life, two massive teeter-totters get slammed back and forth, and television monitors rise and sink at the rear of the stage. Through it all the performers dash with expert timing, executing their puzzling tasks with laserlike focus: moving artificial trees to and fro, lashing themselves by the ankles to TV sets, muttering into microphones. They never indicate any emotional investment in the proceedings, yet they’re never less than fascinating–even when doing next to nothing, as during a curious “ballet” of insignificant gestures and occasional groans. With such engrossing inner lives, these actors create dramatic arcs out of thin air.
In my November 7 review of Beatnik Theatre’s The Talent Pool, I confused the names of two characters. It’s actually Kat McDonnell as the agent Sandy who’s “a marvel of incongruities.” o
