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Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience’s hearts by talking about her daughter’s murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing. Gray said they showed us “what it is to live in the world”.
Watching Gray conjure up this material made a big impression on a young actor called Scott Shepherd. It was the show he saw on his first visit to the Performing Garage, the New York home of the Wooster Group. The pioneering avant garde company had been established a few years earlier by Gray and director Elizabeth LeCompte with their colleagues Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith.
“Interviewing the Audience was quite amazing,” says Shepherd. “His first question was always the same – ‘How did you get to the theatre?’ – and there would be some story about the subway or the taxi and, somehow, he would find a thread from that into the person’s inner being. It was one of the great early theatre experiences of my life.”
By this time, Valk had had an equally transformative experience at the Performing Garage, a theatre so small there was no room for a foyer and some seats were accessible only by climbing a ladder. As an inquisitive acting student, she had headed along to the SoHo venue to see Spalding Gray in two autobiographical pieces, Sakonnet Point (1975) and Rumstick Road (1977). She was hooked.
“I gave up my apartment and moved in upstairs,” Valk says, joining Shepherd on our video call. “It was such an amazing group of artists. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to give up everything and move in here because this is the place to be.’”
Valk became part of the Wooster Group in 1979, initially working as a seamstress and soon as an actor. She has rarely worked outside the company since: “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Now, in a kind of posthumous tribute, both actors are returning to the role Gray created in Nayatt School (1978). This was the piece that followed Sakonnet Point and Rumstick Road in the Rhode Island trilogy and was Gray’s first foray into autobiographical monologues, a forerunner to pieces such as Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box.
Coming to London’s Coronet theatre, Nayatt School Redux is not exactly a revival, but a reimagining of the 1978 show in a very Wooster Group way. “When we go back to look at the old work, it’s not like an artist can pull out her old painting from the warehouse and look at it,” says LeCompte, who lived with Gray in the 1970s. “We can’t do that. We only have very deteriorated, black-and-white material to work from.”
Where Gray – who died in 2004 – was once a friend and colleague, he is now a character in a play about a play he made. “We’re getting as close to channelling his performance in Nayatt School as we can,” says Valk. “I’m the survivor, because I’m still in the group. I knew him, I worked with him, I was young, now I’m old and I’m the person who’s translating and telling you what he did. My monologue is like a palimpsest across the top of Spalding.”
“It’s another act of channelling or ventriloquism,” says Shepherd, recalling the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2005) in which he mimicked an archive recording of Richard Burton. “It’s even more literal this time, because I’m wearing some of the clothes that Spalding wore when he did the show. It does feel a bit seancey.”
Taking its name from a school in Barrington, Rhode Island, where Gray grew up, Nayatt School had all of LeCompte’s celebrated hallmarks. Foremost among these was the collage-like juxtaposition of disparate elements. The production blended vaudeville-style radio skits with TS Eliot’s postwar play The Cocktail Party, itself a curious combination of drawing-room comedy and esoteric religious debate.
Eliot’s play fascinated Gray not only because he owned a cast recording featuring Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, but also because one of its characters, Celia Coplestone, goes on a spiritual journey that ends in her martyrdom. It reminded him of his mother, a Christian Scientist, who killed herself when he was 26. (Gray himself is assumed to have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry to his death.)
The fusion of pop culture and high art has characterised the Wooster Group’s work. In 1984, LSD (Just the High Points) sat at the meeting point of Timothy Leary’s countercultural drug taking and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In 1988, Frank Dell’s the Temptation of St Antony combined Gustave Flaubert with Lenny Bruce. And 1997’s House/Lights was half-Gertrude Stein and half-sexploitation flick.
The company has forged unexpected connections between baroque opera and sci-fi B-movies, Noh theatre and Chekhov. For LeCompte, who trained in painting and photography, such head-spinning collisions are the way she sees the world. “I grew up with the television and art, and they do that all the time,” she says. “You can go from the most serious soap-opera scene to a toothpaste ad. As a kid, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re in the bathroom and they’re going to come out of the bathroom and continue the scene.’ I didn’t see that you needed to connect those things in any rational way.”
She compares her technique to frottage, the artistic practice pioneered by Max Ernst in which pencil rubbings are taken from rough surfaces to create something new. “That’s what I do with the texts and the people,” says LeCompte, rubbing her hands to demonstrate. “The performers are material and I like to rub myself up against them.”
“Not in the literal sense,” she adds, hastily, with a laugh.
The effect can be discombobulating. It can also be funny. “It seems to be fun when it’s high/low,” says Valk. “For instance, this difficult writing by Gertrude Stein juxtaposed with a girl gang from a 60s B-movie. It’s a fun mix, like a cocktail. Sometimes, it’s not logical or reasonable, but you put the source material and the text so they’re vibrating against each other and then they somehow grow together.”
Shepherd adds: “The high and low combination has a double benefit. It takes the high thing down off its pedestal and you can appreciate an earthier humanity that’s encoded in there. And on the flip side, something sublime is exposed in the low thing.”
Getting these combinations to work can be difficult, but once LeCompte has set her course, she never abandons an idea. Shepherd gives the example of Vieux Carré (2008), in which they took a play by Tennessee Williams and layered it on to Paul Morrissey’s films from Andy Warhol’s Factory. “We wanted to get the tone of realism from those movies on to this Tennessee Williams text,” he says. “We had to try and abandon different parts of the films because they didn’t work with the scene. It took us a while to get the right parts. Sometimes we know it’s not working, but not at the level of the whole project falling apart.”
The matching of live actors to recorded film and audio requires discipline. Even if a Wooster Group performance leaves you bewildered, you never lose admiration for the precision of the actors and technicians. “As performers, Scott, myself and Ari Fliakos – the whole middle period of the Wooster Group – have an athlete spirit,” says Valk. “With the copying, the speed, the deftness and the technical skills to follow and respond physically, there is a feat that needs to be accomplished. All three of us enjoy that.”
It is entertaining for audiences too, and if any of this sounds highfalutin, it is to underestimate LeCompte’s sense of joy and wonder. She is less the austere auteur than the enthusiast, delighted at the absurdities of life and art. When Valk refers to the company’s “career”, LeCompte raises her eyebrows, adopts an expression of cartoon horror and draws scare quotes in the air. Imagine calling it a career! Heading for 82 and looking decades younger, she retains her sense of delight and mischief. She flashes another broad smile and heads off to rehearsal.
Nayatt School Redux is at Coronet theatre, London, 17–25 April
