| The Wooster Group's SYMPHONY OF RATS - tonight | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 10:07 pm EDT 04/06/24 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 10:00 pm EDT 04/06/24 | |
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| The evening's co-director, Elizabeth LeCompte greets you when you enter The Performing Garage, a space that the Wooster Group has used as its home since 1980. And it feels like a home, for an audience, a troupe of actors, and an artistic tradition. The text is by Richard Foreman and was first performed by the group in 1988 (see Mel Gussow's review below in the link). Like most of Foreman's plays SYMPHONY OF RATS is set in a dreamscape or the interior of a someone's existence, if existence could be diagrammed in three dimensional space on stage. It is cryptic, fragmented yet highly theatrical with a subtle wise-ass wit to it. And LeCompte and Kate Valk's staging of the text is in constant, elegant motion. Not a frenzied expenditure of motion for motion's sake but a deliciously detailed, thoughtful and mysterious shifting of gestures and objects that repeat themselves and morph into each other on the stage and through the performances. The cast is exciting to watch, led by Ari Fliakos and Jim Fletcher. Though their roles are less single characters and more like many characters or a single character fragmented into mirrored reflections, they grow on you through the evening and you begin to get to know them in an intimate way. In fact, at the end of the 80 minute performance there is almost a feeling that you've been through a Chekhov play. Perhaps it has something to do with the intimacy of the space but more likely something to do with the way the actors have prepared and are working with each other on stage. And also something to do with Foreman, LeCompte, Valk and the actors' commitment to a poetry about existence. Funny, sad, sometime terrifying and bleak but at its end, soul satisfying. |
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| Link | Gussow's review of original SYMPHONY OF RATS |
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