Double Exposure

The Wooster Group has been staging memory plays for thirty years. In the mid-seventies, autobiographical remembrances from founding member Spalding Gray's formative years—particularly the trauma of his mother's suicide—provided the theatre company with raw material for its inaugural creations, Sakonnet Point and Rumstick Road. At the same time as they embodied Gray's family reminiscences, these early works also probed memory's unintentional, but nevertheless pernicious, tendency to degrade its object's complexity. As Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte insisted, "it's really about us thinking about the past."¹ Later performances, such as Route 1 & 9 and L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .), revealed the violence at work in the broad cultural memory enshrined in American literary "classics." These pieces, wrought from the wisdom that every act of remembering is likewise an act of forgetting, attended to the racial, sexual, and political experiences that the canon elides. And throughout the years, the Group's deployment of the media technologies that quietly condition our everyday perceptions has reminded audiences that even in live theatrical performance the distinction between spontaneous event and reenactment remains fragile. Practically every work by The Wooster Group questions the memorial fissure between past and present and the metastasizing cultural and technological means of reinforcing that comfortable boundary.

For The Wooster Group, memory—for better or worse—is the fabric of both theatre and the supposed immediacy it offers. How fitting, then, that the company's latest piece engages Tennessee Williams, paramount weaver of American memory plays. With a beguiling production in New York in 2011, the Group dusted off Williams's maligned and forgotten late work Vieux Carré. In doing so, The Wooster Group continued its preoccupation with the vexed matter of theatrical presence and furnished its conceptual bent with the psychic substance of Williams's theatre, where "life is all memory, except for that present moment that goes by so quickly you hardly catch it going."

Vieux Carré was one of Williams's last major works to premiere on Broadway. Its disastrous 1977 production closed after just five performances and a bombardment of disenchanted notices. Critics discarded the play as an inferior knock-off of his earlier triumphs: Walter Kerr, otherwise one of Williams's chief apologists, belittled it as a play that "very much means to be a 'memory' play in the style of Glass Menagerie," impugning its lack of dramatic propulsion and its "aimlessness." Kerr later lamented, "I wonder if Mr. Williams's distinctive creative voice tends to diminish in direct proportion to his preoccupation with himself and his past."2 Meanwhile, Williams protested in vain that he was not attempting some slipshod imitation of The Glass Menagerie—rather, he was advancing a new, deliberately experimental dramaturgy that, like The Wooster Group's methods, destabilizes previously neat formal features of memory onstage.

Recent scholarship on Williams has read afresh what once rankled critical sensibilities during the playwright's reputed artistic wane. The Wooster Group's piece performs a similar critical rehabilitation. In their sensitive hands, Vieux Carré is not the derivative semi-autobiographical ramble that reviewers wrote off. Instead, staging a barely-edited version of Williams's text, The Wooster Group makes virtues of what critics once pegged as indulgent and formally scattershot about the play, accentuating his dramatic techniques and matching them with the Group's own sophisticated theatrical procedures. At the same time, the Wooster Group's choice of Vieux Carré recasts the company as an heir to Williams, affirming its deep continuity with the modern American tradition he represents.

Unfolding within the walls of a squalid flophouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1938, Williams's play is an impressionistic whorl of vignettes that depicts the artistic and sexual flowering of a young author, standing in for Williams himself. Clive Barnes once described the play's structure as "the cross-section of a house."³ (This image, incidentally, accords with The Wooster Group's own early scenic designs, which cracked open...