shakespeare as ceremonial dance
by Douglas Messerli
William Shakespeare (as adapted by
the Wooster Group and Elizabeth LeCompte) Cry,
Trojans! (Troilus & Cressida) / the performance I saw as on March 2,
2014 at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater Redcat
The Wooster Group’s production of
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
began as a joint project between the American experimental group—whose major
projects have deconstructed and recontextualized classic works—and the Royal
Shakespeare Company of England, who basically present more standardized
productions of the Bard’s work. For the London production, the Wooster players
created a text, using Shakespeare’s language, which featured the Trojans as a
native American tribe, while the RSC concentrated on the Greeks using a more
formalized Shakespearian approach. The two worked separately, coming together
just days before the production, purposely clashing in styles and approaches,
particularly in the second part, where Cressida is given over the Greeks and
the two sides erupt into battle.
I might have certainly enjoyed that pairing, delighting surely in the
way the two might play off against each other. The version I saw in Los Angeles
the other night, however, was, perhaps, a far more coherent rendering,
performed by only the Wooster Group, with the company playing both the Trojans
and the Greeks, representing the former with elaborate costumes and plastic
appendages designed by artist Folkert de Jong and the latter in cowboy-like
masks while speaking in a drag-version of Aussie-British English. The Trojans
are clearly at the center the group’s reconfiguration of the piece, and,
obviously, some of what might have resulted in clashes of outlandish
proportions had been tamed by the work’s new focus.
The Los Angeles Times critic
Charles McNaulty—usually an admirably intelligent and reliable theater
critic—wrote, in a piece titled “Not great Wooster or Shakespeare,” that the
new version did not work for Shakespeare traditionalists nor for those who love
the New York group’s sendups of classic theater pieces. He felt the work was
filled with meaningless stereotypes and that it lacked technological brilliance
of their other productions:
The company has made
its name by reflecting canonical texts
in a multimedia fun
house mirror. Normally the stage is awash
in bleeping technology,
but perhaps in recognition of the fact that
our lives are now
inundated with screens, director Elizabeth
LeCompte has chosen to
keep the video relatively low key.
Even if the four small video screens used here may not exactly light up
the stage the way they did in the group’s Vieux
Carré, for example, they were crucial to the meaning and substance of the
Wooster’s final version. Some may have simply perceived the screens filled with
strange Eskimo-like representations or as camp images of Hollywood films. But,
in fact, they were carefully chosen to parallel the seemingly Amazon-like
tribal images of the play’s Trojans. And, most important, nearly all the
“chorographical” movements of LeCompte’s actors were determined by the relation
of the figures on these small screens. The arguments between Hector (Ari
Fliakos) and Troilus (Scott Shepherd), the significant movements of the Trojan
warriors are almost all “stolen” from the actors in the Inukitut-language
Canadian film, made by Zacharias Kunuk in 2001, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (ᐊᑕᓈᕐᔪᐊᑦ), itself
taken from an oral tradition of Inukitut myths.* The special relationships
between Troilus and Cressida (Kate Valk) are borrowed from Eliza Kazan’s movie Splendor in the Grass of 1961,
paralleling the movements of the forlorn love relationship between Warren
Beatty and Natalie Wood. At other
moments there were scenes from Native American director Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and, as Cassandra (Suzy
Roche) sings out her prophetic warnings the videos center on a scene of a young
girl singing, which vaguely reminds me of images of a long-ago witnessed clip
of a child-like Diana Durbin singing before an audience. The fact that, at one
point, the Trojans sit about the campfire on colorful basketballs, momentarily
tossing them at one another, hints of the comic sequence from Airplane! wherein the white Peace Corps
worker (Robert Hays) claims to have taught the isolated Amazon natives with
whom he has been stationed to play basketball; the camera observes the tribe on
the court (the tribe being performed by the Harlem Globetrotters). In short, if
the Wooster Group uses stereotypical elements it is not without humor or, in
other cases, is based on actual native myths. If the Greeks seem less
interesting in this production it is simply because that they represent the
conquering classicists who are not engaged in totemistic behavior. It’s clear
that the Wooster company prefers the lost culture.
While the Trojans are bound by clan traditions (represented here by
films relating to that oral tradition and by Hollywood-structured emblems, our
own clan-like constructions, which we do not even recognize as such), the
Greeks are an individualistic culture of art, poetry, music, etc. Strangely
enough, however, in the end it is the Trojans who are willing to fight alone to
their deaths, while Achilles (also portrayed by Scott Shepherd), in his rage
over his male lover’s Patroculus’s death, orders his men to ambush Hector,
killing him like a gang of thugs of before they drag away his dead body behind
Achilles’ horse.
While this may not be the most successful of the many Wooster Group
plays I have enjoyed over the years, it is not without its own profound
overlaying of images which create a density of meanings and cultural significance
that adds to and illuminates the original Shakespeare play.
In the end I feel this work displayed a new subtlety in the group’s
development, depending less upon ironic pointing and more on the ability of its
audience to focus less on story and language—while, however, retaining
both—than on ceremonial-like movements of its actor’s bodies, as if this play
had been relocated into a world of dance, movements represented on the special
arc-like paintings the figures drew throughout upon the stage’s floor.
*Fortunately, I attended this
performance with my friend Deborah Meadows, who immediately recognized the
Inukititut film by Zacharias Kanuk; I, in turn, told her about the images from
the Kazan film. Unfortunately, the company did not list their video sources on
the program nor on their web-site.
Los
Angeles, March 4, 2014
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2014).
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