Our Town Our Country

0 0 R If you follow Route 1 all the way north from New Jersey you'll end up in Vermont , the landscape of Thornton Wilder's Our Town which is the center(piece) of The Wooster Group's Route 1 and 9 (The Last Act). The intersection of these two sensibilities -Wilder's genteel view of small town America at the turn of the century and the Group's more abrasive contemporary politics-generates a new text whose subject is "our country.'' Wilder is, I think, the unacknowledged early link to avant-garde theater. When most of his contemporaries were busy devising literal settings for their plays, he was already working out the idea of performance space: in that differentiation lies the history of experimentation in American theater. Early on Wilder understood how space, as a highly artificialized property, could be constructed during the performance itself, a project he put into practice and which The Wooster Group has carried on. The notion of building a space has always been important in the Group's aesthetic, acting as conceptual backbone of its anarchic union of forms and raw-edge emotions: their productions force audiences to watch how they are being put together because the process of making theater won't let itself be taken for granted. In Route 1 and 9 the performance is very rigorously delineated in four segments which, briefly, are these: "The Lesson" (on video tape), "The Party" and a romantic scene from Our Town, "The Last Act'"which is the final scene ofOur Town, and an overlapping explicitly sexual video tape that plays off the porno genre and "Route 1 and 9" film. The cross cutting of film and live action from two rhythmically different performance "texts" creates the dialectical "frame" of reference this difficult, disturb43 CN BONNI E MARRANCA ing work evolves, and to which Elizabeth LeCompte gives so startling a directorial shape. Ron Vawter opens the production with a satiric reconstruction of a 1965 Encyclopedia Britannica film lesson which demonstrates how to interpret Our Town-this is the way most of us were taught play analysis in school. His purposefully fautous and wooden, impersonal delivery challenges the whole system of Cartesian logic, in fact the humanist tradition of interpretation itself, by which knowledge is transmitted in the culture. The speech doesn't by itself mock the play, but the comically gestural, old-fashioned acting style in which it is delivered only serves to show the aesthetic distance we've travelled through modernist art and theory: the classical approach to interpreting drama is too codified and stale for an open system work such as Route 1 and 9. Set against this "lesson" is the alternative model of the "learning play" (in the specific Brechtian sense of the term) that the Group proposes. Video is used again for a romantic scene (in close-up) between a young couple in Wilder's play. What is remarkable about this scene, played in an intense, soap opera acting style, is its inherent commentary on language, chiefly the distinctions between stage language and film language, but beyond that theatrical dialogue and the more natural speech that has replaced it in avant-garde theater, and finally, pointing up the differences between acting and performing . Quite simply, the highly charged, expressive language that Wilder's characters speak overwhelms video 44 1\5 technology. I found myself watching a monitor furthest from where I was sitting because the dialogue was too powerful, perhaps "full" is more correct a word, for a film medium. (Theater productions fail on television precisely because of this disproportionate sense of scale in the speech.) What's more, I realize how much I regret the absence of inflected, unselfconscious stage speech. Some of the actors in this video love scene re-emerge in the sex film segment (e.g., Willem Dafoe is both the young George of Our Town and the randy male), in the sequence in which whites in blackface variously set up the space for the next scene (Wilder's stage hands also prepare the cemetery scene), drink, dance, party and call up take-out food places (here real time intrudes on artificial time), and in the...