When Strangers Become Something More

You will be disoriented for the first several moments of The
Wooster Group’s deconstruction of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré. There’s no getting around it: As characters emerge
from the gloom surrounding the messy platforms and doors hanging from wires,
their voices not quite in sync with their mouths, the effect is, at first,
impenetrable. For anyone unfamiliar with the original 1977 play, gathering just
who is who (and what and where) can be a daunting task.

But as the confusion clears, the dissolute souls on stage
begin to take shape—as does The Wooster Group’s take on the play. Turning the
loosely-connected vignettes of Williams’ original play into an unflinching look
at the betrayals inherent in the artistic process, director Elizabeth LeCompte
makes the men and women of the boarding house into puppets for the nameless
writer, who happily jots down all of their fears and fights.

Performed with a dreamy intensity by a hardworking cast of
seven (plus a few more who appear only on video), Williams’ nameless stand-in
(Ari Fliakos, who does almost everything in just a jockstrap) takes notes,
explores his sexuality and observes the life-and-death struggles of his
neighbors. If LeCompte sometimes emphasizes the garishness of Williams’
characters, the initially off-putting effects (particularly a massive dildo
springing out of the pants of a lecherous artist) gradually seem like valid
choices, ones that Williams might have made had his later-in-life
adventurousness not been hampered by the reputations of his previous major
plays.

Vieux Carré is
pure, later Williams: dream-like, sexually fixated and melancholy. The writer
still lusts for his sole homosexual encounter, a paratrooper to whom he blurts
out “I love you” after sex; dying Northerner Jane (Kate Valk) abandons herself
to sexual pleasures with the opportunistic Tye (Scott Shepherd); aging artist
Nightingale (Shepherd again) seeks comfort in the paid-for arms of younger men;
and landlady Mrs. Wire (Valk) turns to the writer for a replacement son. These
lost and lonely Williams souls are familiar people (Mrs. Wire even pours
boiling water through cracks in her floorboards to bring an orgy to a halt,
just as the upstairs neighbors in A
Streetcar Named Desire did), but taken to extremes. No one ever seems
destined for a truly happy ending in a Williams play, but these damaged men and
women seem even less likely candidates for happiness.

LeCompte and her designers take the broad theatricality of
Williams’ work as their blueprint for the production. In their boldest choice,
they turn upside down the rote character of Nursie, an elderly black
housekeeper who sometimes bursts into spirituals. Instead of the Aunt Jemima
character we see briefly on a screen, LeCompte casts African-American actress
Kaneza Schaal and directs her to deliver her lines with the nasal uptalk of a
much put-upon Valley girl. (And though the Wooster Group’s general manager
denies that Schaal is in whiteface, her makeup certainly gives that
impression.) In that one choice, LeCompte and The Wooster Group put to shame
the rest of the deconstructed revivals that are all the rage these days. It’s
brave, politically charged and surprising, all in one, and not the imposition
of a director’s vision on a work that can’t support it. In that, The Wooster
Group proves itself very much aligned with the kind of theater that Williams so
desperately tried to practice from the ’60s on.

Vieux Carré

Through March 13, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St.
(betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-868-4444; $20–$65.