Faust meets the info age.House/Lights: An Adaptation of Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights * The Performing Garage, New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. (through February 28) * Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte Elizabeth LeCompte (born April 28 1944) is a founding member of theater collective The Wooster Group. She is considered one of the 50 most influential theater directors of today. * Performed by the Wooster Group Best-known for launching the movie-star careers of Spalding Gray Spalding Gray (June 5, 1941 – ca. January 10, 2004) was an American actor, screenwriter and playwright. Career After a few minor cinema roles and appearing in The Farmer's Daughter and Willem Dafoe, the Wooster Group is one of the world's foremost experimental theaters, famous for its high-powered performers and high-tech design. The company specializes in productions that bounce a dramatic classic off some wacky alternative text: Thornton Wilder's Our Town meets Pigmeat Markham's vaudeville routines or Arthur Miller's The Crucible funneled through the reminiscences of Timothy Leary's baby-sitter. Although the company's founding members included the late gay actor Ron Vawter Ron Vawter (December 9, 1948, Latham, New York – April 16, 1994) was a founding member of The Wooster Group after graduating from Siena College in Loudonville, New York. , who created the legendary Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, the Wooster Group has never dealt with overtly gay content--until now. Its newest production, playing at the company's SoHo home base, the Performing Garage, juxtaposes Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights with scenes from a corny corn·y adj. corn·i·er, corn·i·est Trite, dated, melodramatic, or mawkishly sentimental. [From corn1. 1964 soft-core porn film called Olga's House of Shame, about the lesbian proprietor of a sinister academy for girls. Unlike the company's last show--a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape--House/Lights is a more abstract, intellectually challenging piece of theater. In its dada-poetic way, Stein's 1938 play (conceived as an opera libretto libretto (ləbrĕt`ō) [Ital.,=little book], the text of an opera or an oratorio. Although a play usually emphasizes an integrated plot, a libretto is most often a loose plot connecting a series of episodes. ) portrays a Faust who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for the illusory thrill of electric light, which symbolized fame to Stein and suggests high technology, sex, and any material lust to director Elizabeth LeCompte. In typical Wooster Group fashion, LeCompte arranges the stage as a steely landscape of video monitors, sophisticated sound equipment, even a chic Indian woman operating a laptop. This mechanical world is given life by the actors. Central to the show is the virtuosic performance of Kate Valk, who as Faustus/Elaine speaks almost the entire Stein text herself in an intimate, electronically filtered whisper. The same actors play figures from the Faust legend (folk-pop singer Suzzy Roche makes a delicious devil) as well as characters from Olga's in a style closer to dance than to kitchen-sink drama. Although there's some very sexy lesbian interplay (nipple nipple - Trackpoint fondling and mock S/M S-M or S/M abbr. sadomasochism S/M n abbr (= sadomasochism) → S/M ), House/Lights is less a linear narrative than a dreamlike meditation on the Faustian bargain that we have struck with advanced media technology. Give us cable TV, the Internet, and the history of the world on video, and we'll create a culture that jumbles everything together--God and the devil and Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop--in an alchemical stew, so it's sometimes hard to tell whether the result is shit or gold. Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press. |
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