Leaving the theatre after the Wooster Group’s production of Nayatt School Redux, I overheard numerous audience members wrestling with the same question: why has this New York avant-garde company chosen to resurrect a production from 1978? I’m still not entirely sure, and the question lingers.
The spine of the evening is a grainy, indistinct video of Nayatt School – not a polished archival recording, but something shot by an audience member on a handheld camera during a performance in Amsterdam. Directed, as the original was, by Elizabeth LeCompte, the film footage features Wooster Group stalwarts Spalding Gray – best known for Swimming to Cambodia and Gray’s Anatomy – and Ron Vawter. The London production opens with Kate Valk, a founding member of the company, seated at a long table at the front of the stage with a record player and props from the original show. She starts and stops the video, projected on a screen behind her, contextualising Gray’s performance and at times lip-synching along with it. The film shows Gray explaining his childhood fascination with a vinyl recording of T.S. Eliot’s 1949 play, The Cocktail Party.
Valk is compelling. She dishes out history alongside genuinely delicious backstage details – including the story of performer Libby Howes, who lived beneath the theatre’s risers and had a habit of inviting in hobos and homeless men. Valk cracks jokes, provides context, and – in a move that feels entirely in the spirit of the evening – makes a plug for the company’s new DVD of the very show you’re currently watching. It’s a purposeful, self-aware theatrical mash-up: an archival video of a previously performed play, incorporating lines from Eliot, performed by a beloved dead actor, being recreated live in front of you, while you’re offered the chance to buy the finished recording of what you haven’t yet finished watching. It’s complexly self-referential, and not without irony and humour.
The second half of the evening becomes a word-for-word, movement-by-movement reenactment of the second half of the original play – this time a filmed rehearsal – again on a video screen that is projected behind the live action. We watch an absurdist take on The Cocktail Party, duplicated on- screen and performed live before us — actors crashing into props and each other, spouting lines thrown to the wind or lobbed at fellow performers lost in their own private worlds. Whether it entirely works probably depends on your appetite for that sort of theatre of the absurd.
The set makes good use of the original props, and the sound design has a pleasingly scruffy 1970s feel – not polished nostalgia, more like the real thing dug out from storage.
Valk herself – grey-haired and bespectacled now – is as luminous and drily funny as her younger self, commanding the evening with ease alongside a cast almost entirely a generation younger. What she doesn’t try and conjure – yet still somehow resonates – is the Zeitgeist of the era. For those who were part of that downtown New York scene, this will feel like a fond look back at a fertile moment: everything accessible and affordable, artists at La MaMa, the Pyramid Club and private apartments pushing at the edges of what theatre could be, with the Wooster Group at the epicentre of that fertile, experimental epoch.
Which brings us back to the central question: why remount this? The discovery of that Amsterdam footage seems the likely catalyst – and perhaps that’s reason enough. Their signature absurd and discordant style doesn’t land quite the same way it did forty years ago; the world has caught up with a lot of it. But the energy, the commitment and the sheer joy of avant-garde performance haven’t dimmed one bit.
Nayatt School Redux
Composed by: The Company
Directed by: Elizabeth LeCompte
Performers: Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, Suzzy Roche, Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney, Kate Valk, Omar Zubair
Set: Elizabeth LeCompte
Running until: 25 April
Running time: 80 minutes, without interval
Photo Credit: Spencer Ostrander