Tennessee Williams gets the Wooster treatment
By Ryan Tracy
Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré is The Wooster Group’s first attempt at interpreting a work by the tortured and turbulent dramatist who gave us Stanley Kowalski, Big Daddy and a slew of iconic catchphrases. The troupe returns to its home at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where it continues its tenure as the theater-in-residence, to present its version of the play after stints at the RedCat in L.A. and the Edinburgh Festival.
Vieux Carré is an obscure, autobiographical Williams work that the playwright completed near the end of his life, and that ran on Broadway in 1977 before shuttering after only five performances. It may have had something to do with the conspicuous gayness of the work, which takes quite a bold step beyond the usual innuendo and veiled homoeroticism that one normally finds simmering beneath many of Williams’ texts.
A scene from a recent production of The Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré.
The play follows the coming-of-age of a young writer, a character drawn from Williams’ own memories of his time living in the French Quarter of New Orleans, trying to write plays, coming to terms with his and others people’s homosexuality (the words “gay” and “faggot” appear in the script) and ultimately turning his creative attention to the tortured heterosexual couple then living in the same attic loft as Williams, who would become the prototypes for some of Williams’ most memorable characters.
While perhaps too hot—and too nuanced—for a highbrow Broadway audience hovering above the era of punk and disco, this is prime material for a Woosterian riff on sex, the creative process and self-deception.
“We sort of embraced all of that,” says Ari Fliakos, a Wooster Group veteran who essays the lead role of The Writer. “We took his cues.”
There isn’t likely a politics at work in Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré, however, where themes and agendas—political or narrative—tend to be discarded in favor of a process that is about the process of making theater. “We’re not really trying to pretend that’s not happening,” Fliakos says of the Wooster Group’s signature style. The company is known for its multi-leveled, multimedia approach to more conventional works of literature—such as Hamlet and, more notoriously, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—and by utilizing extra-textual source material as a catalyst for creating its theater. Bluntly put: In a post-modern world, sometimes a script just isn’t enough. In addition to Williams’ play, the troupe has used his journals as well as visits to New Orleans and the house Williams lived in as clues to unlocking the theater within the drama.
This process might have more in common with the Williams text than one might first assume. Throughout Williams’ quixotic play, The Writer’s role shifts from subject to storyteller, until the audience realizes that The Writer has become the writer, and what you’re watching is Thomas Lanier Williams’ metamorphosis into Tennessee Williams. “The Writer is making all of this happen,” Fliakos notes.
But the actor is adamant that this synchronicity and these auxiliary references are not what Wooster’s work is about. “The source material is used more as a performance tool. It’s not a dominant aspect of the work. At the end of the day, what’s important is how the materials we’re using illuminate the characters and the text,” Fliakos explains, adding, “We’re performing the play pretty faithfully.”
As to what the playwright—who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year—would think of Vieux Carré getting the Wooster Group treatment? “It’s entertaining and sexy,” Fliakos says. “I think he’d be happy.”
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Feb. 2-27, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St., 212-868-4444; $20+.
