A president dropping grip with actuality. Warnings of environmental catastrophe and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.
The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that initially starred Kate Valk, who directs this manufacturing together with Elizabeth LeCompte, invitations darkish topical readings. It’s an election yr, in any case.
So why does this manufacturing really feel so candy and escapist?
For one factor, the vaudevillian insanity onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, intellectual with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — doesn’t construct on its political subject material. It’s solely the floor of a far weirder, digressive manufacturing whose obsession is just not with the true world however what’s beneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) doesn’t stand in for any particular politician, and might come off as an atypical determine overwhelmed by occasions. In one of many present’s many dreamy traces, he says, “I appeared to have returned from a profound expertise of elsewhereness.”
That is what it felt prefer to return from a brand new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new exhibits a decade in the past. And for the theater followers who mourn his loss from the cultural panorama, this Wooster Group present operates like a pleasant love letter, from one large of experimental theater to a different.
Foreman didn’t break conventional guidelines of narrative or character a lot as invent his personal. His surreal exhibits existed in their very own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs had been bisected by wires that turned the stage into an online. The temper was someway each menacing and playful, its which means ineffable and the general impact completely singular. Requested in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked after which stated precisely what you’d need the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We live in decadent instances, surrounded by nothing however trash.”
“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is introduced as a puppet (even his bowel actions are carried out with help), and the stage is full of rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the scale of the great actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic aptitude challenge an otherworldly deadpan.
The dominant theme right here isn’t these animals a lot as different realities, whether or not or not it’s an alien world, a “mirror thoughts,” a lozenge that when eaten takes you — “Alice in Wonderland” fashion — to a magical land.
That’s not even moving into Tornadoville. LeCompte, whose video-game-like manufacturing designs are persistently playful, nods to the Foreman aesthetic: the cluttered set, clear panes, the wires. However the Wooster Group is extra technologically and popular culture savvy. Hyung Seok Jeon’s video work is elaborate and summary, with references to “Star Wars” or a John Cena film, and a re-creation of a famously balletic scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Nice Dictator” is carried out with grace by Fletcher and Fliakos.
There’s a conspiratorial streak on this play that this manufacturing doesn’t do a lot with, a darkness that goes underexplored. Its rodents don’t appear to symbolize exploitation and corruption a lot as the idea that the world is just too weird for realism, too cracked for joyful endings or closure. On the finish, Fletcher appears to handle the necessity for some coherence, talking right into a microphone: “Is it potential that each one of you on the market had been collaborating in a detective story?” Then he provides bluntly: “Right here’s what occurred.”
Don’t be fooled. What follows is a yarn complemented by a cooking present the place we see the torso of a lady flip excrement into chocolate chip cookies — considered one of a number of gross-out moments aimed on the intestine moderately than the top. It’s a present that reminds us that simply because artwork goals to disorient doesn’t imply that it’s a puzzle to be solved.
Symphony of RatsThrough Might 4 on the Performing Storage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Operating time: 1 hour quarter-hour.
