North Atlantic and L.S.D. (review)

North Atlantic and L.S.D. The Wooster Group Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte The Performing Garage (New York) Elinor Fuchs The debate between Structuralists and Post-Structuralists as to whether writing precedes speech, or speech writing, has potentially important implications for theatre, though by and large these theorists have ignored theatre. If writing, or what Derrida calls "ecriture" is primary, is it disingenuous to continue to create theatre works and performance styles that strive to foster the illusion that stage diction is spontaneous speech? This problem has increasingly absorbed the attention of the Wooster Group, to the extent that their present style could almost be described as an exploration of performance as acts of reading. The group's inquiry into performance-as-reading began in 1978 with the use of a section of The Cocktail Party (read both by members of the company and by the original London cast on a recording) as the opening segment of Nayatt School. During this part of the play, the company sat at a long narrow reading table, running the full width of the house, and set immediately in front of the high bleachers holding the audience. Below and behind the table stretched a large playing area where most of the action took place. In the group's most recent works, North Atlantic and the evolving L.S.D., the playing area has been drastically foreshortened to become the reading lectern itself, an elevated table fitted out with chairs and microphones. Correspondingly , the group's frontal, presentational style has crystallized into variations on reading, such as reading from books in the body of performance , rapid-fire recitation, and repetition from dictation. At the same time the work bristles with electronic speech-distancing devices-telephones, tape recorders and standing and table microphones. 51 Point Judith and Route 1 & 9, the two plays that followed Nayatt School and immediately preceded these recent works, were constructed almost entirely of the "misreadings" of apparently unrelated texts. The clamorous shouting of Long Day's Journey and the bathetic, soap opera reading of Our Town went against the traditional grain of these works, focusing the attention of the audience on the plays as texts, rather than as transparent windows to plot and character. These "constructions" of director Elizabeth LeCompte, composed typically of two texts plus film, instructed the audience to seek meaning not in reality behind the text, but in the collision between texts, or between the conventionally accepted meaning of a particular text and the deconstructive reading of it adopted by the Wooster Group. What was originally Part One of L.S.D.-a 45-minute reading/performance of Arthur Miller's The Crucible-was shown for seventeen performances in early 1983 as a work-in-progress, returned without the work-in-progress disclaimer several months later in somewhat altered form, and returned again in the spring of 1984, now reduced to 20 minutes and flanked by the new parts One and Three, the Timothy Leary segments of the continuing work-in-progress. These three parts were then taken to the Boston Shakespeare Company for a month-long run, and will return to New York in the 1984-5 season, with the addition of a fourth part using film by Ken Kobland and possibly a fifth part involving Lenny Bruce. The serial, provisional quality of this evolving work, whose length and nature keep changing as the group does more research (i.e., reading), exposes in a way the serial basis of theatre in multiple readings. There is an actual, chemical connection between The Crucible and the Leary material in the recent speculation that "witchcraft" may have resulted from hallucinogenic states induced by ergot in spoiled grain. The Wooster Group put the material together in order to explore whether and why society has a need to punish its visionaries. LeCompte and the actors had experienced a sense of persecution during the Route 1 & 9 run, when the group was charged with racism and its funds cut by the New York State Council on the Arts. As the work has grown, however, the group's relationship to its material has become more ethically complex and ambiguous: Leary was not the hero originally imagined and...