The Wooster Group and O’Neill
Whether working with realistic dialogue by Arthur Miller, a “hot” routine by black vaudeville comic Pigmeat Markham—who regularly performed in blackface, for mostly black audiences, from the nineteen-thirties through nineteen-fifties—or O’Neill’s early experimental work, the Wooster Group, which began in the mid-1970s, remains unapologetically experimental. In his book American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, Arnold Aronson provides an overview of the Wooster Group’s approach to theater-making as he discusses the company’s Route 1 & 9 (1981), which began with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and soon incorporated other texts and different performance genres:
By breaking down the structure (“language”) of a particular play, resituating it, and placing it in juxtaposition to other shards and fragments of culture (other “language systems” as it were), the underlying assumptions and social codes of the original texts were exposed, and new meanings and understandings emerged. In this way, classical works could be reintegrated into contemporary popular culture, but always through the prism of the collective vision of the Wooster Group.3
Since the ensemble of artists shapes the work collaboratively, the artists’ roles are not strictly limited, as in a conventional theater production, to actor, designer, director, etc. Founding company member and actor Kate Valk, for example, prefers to be called an artist rather than an actor since, in addition to acting, she participates in developing the work. In the Wooster Group’s recent production, Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), another of the company’s active founding members, Elizabeth LeCompte—the director of nearly every piece the company has produced over its three-plus decades of existence—has reversed primary roles with Valk, who is now directing LeCompte and the play’s other actors.
While working in a collective fashion, usually under the direction of LeCompte (a recent exception was the Early Plays [2012], a collaborative production with the New York City Players directed by the Players’ Richard Maxwell), the company’s way of making theater remains eclectic and irreducible to a particular style. As Aronson further elaborates,
it was as if the group took a Brechtian sense of alienation from the Performance Group [the company from which the Wooster Group emerged], chance methodology from [John] Cage, a minimalist emphasis upon the frame over content from the art world, and a non-hierarchical approach to culture from postmodernism, and then mixed it through the solipsistic and self-referential world of performance art.4
Productions by the Wooster Group often feature numerous written texts, even when one of them is a full-length (usually cut-up and shortened) play, although the company found it unnecessary to add other written texts to its productions of O’Neill’s stylistic bookends, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, because these two expressionistic plays already offer a pliable theatrical form that realistic plays lack.
Another production, the aforementioned Early Plays, featured three of O’Neill’s early “sea plays”—The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home. Each short one-act was performed in its entirety, as written, although in an affectless manner that foregrounded the writing itself, bringing to mind Brecht’s notion of the onstage “literarization” of a play which Brecht believed could facilitate “complex seeing.”5 By stripping away conventional aspects of realistic acting, such as empathy and accents, from dialogue that is meant to be spoken with accents, director Maxwell created a more literal presentation of the plays which, by blocking the spectator’s usual empathetic identification with dramatic characters, allowed the spectator to hear the writing more clearly, including O’Neill’s oddly spelled lines of dialect. This distancing effect also helped to undercut aspects of the plays that could be construed (by today’s standards) as overly expository or melodramatic. Subsequently, the spectator was able to gain a renewed appreciation for the originality of O’Neill’s writing, as writing, even within these short one-acts which, while crucially important to the development of American drama (as discussed later in the chapter), are still considered minor within O’Neill’s oeuvre.
The one other O’Neill play utilized by the Wooster Group, within their production of Point Judith (1980), was none other than Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the realistic, personally cathartic full-length drama that cemented O’Neill’s legacy with its posthumous premiere in 1956. Focusing on a single character, played by Spalding Gray, Point Judith presented a brief (but intense) version of O’Neill’s long play as part of a montage of other texts, including an opening piece, Rig, by Jim Strahs—which Strahs based on Wooster Group improvs that came out of Long Day’s Journey—as well as a film. Long Day’s Journey Into Night itself—whose regular running time can exceed three hours—was done as “a thirteen-minute version…at breakneck speed.”6 The radical cutting-up of the text, along with the performance’s extremely rapid pace and frenetic, non-realistic movement, subverted the work’s realistic conventions, which were further undermined by the cross-gender casting that featured Willem Dafoe as Mary, the character based on O’Neill’s morphine-addicted mother.
In productions by the Provincetown Players and (during very different times) the Wooster Group, several of O’Neill’s early plays have shown themselves to be both formally innovative and dramatically effective. Indeed, along with many of his other plays that pre-date his late masterworks of realism, these plays provide “a dynamic, imaginative world replete with theatricalism,”7 suggesting that O’Neill was intensely involved with a wide range of aesthetic strategies.
Theatrical Experimentation: 1922
Although the Wooster Group deploys, today, a non-realistic, postmodern aesthetic that enables them to re-energize O’Neill’s nearly century-old texts for contemporary audiences, the original productions of some of the same plays still required a decidedly non-realistic and non-naturalistic mise-en-scène. The 1922 production of The Hairy Ape, for example, which O’Neill considered a “direct descendant” of The Emperor Jones, demanded a highly theatrical presentation. As O’Neill himself advised in the stage directions at the top of scene one: “The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic.”8 (See p. 123.) Suggesting that the non-naturalistic mise-en-scène requested by O’Neill was integral to all aspects of the play’s original production, critical reviews of the play pointed to a lone actress who veered from the dramatist’s above stage direction. As Ronald H. Wainscott notes, the only performer “singled out for ineptitude”9 was Mary Blair, who played Mildred, the young woman who visits the stokehole. According to O’Neill’s stage directions the character should look “as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived.”10 (See p. 124.) Yet “Blair’s emotional methods [according to Wainscott]…almost precluded her ability to approach such an artificial [theatrical] character.”11 Subsequently, when the production moved uptown from the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights’ Theatre to Broadway, the director replaced Blair with an actress capable of performing in a style that was more in synch with the play’s theatricality.
The critical praise for actor Louis Wolheim, who played The Hairy Ape’s protagonist, Yank, also suggests the importance of non-naturalistic acting to the production. Wolheim, a Princeton graduate and former boxer who, according to critic Brooks Atkinson, helped turn the drama “into a savage hubub with devastating philosophical and political overtones,”12 “alternately engaged and alienated his audience, always returning to the empathic suffering in Yank’s journey.”13 Apparently, Wolheim’s acting style, which was also noted for its intelligence, alternated between the sort of engagement and alienation, empathetic identification and distancing that would later become hallmarks of Brecht’s persistently non-naturalistic epic theater.
The critical and commercial success of The Hairy Ape, as well as the professional limitations of the Provincetown Players, which had originally been founded as an amateur