Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The Wooster Group’s A PINK CHAIR is a triumph of rigor, execution, and the avant-garde

• By drediman
• May 26, 2018
• No Comments

The company of The Wooster Group’s “A Pink Chair” at The Performing Garage.

I recently wrote a piece about the death avant-garde theater. Well, I was proven wrong this afternoon after having seen The Wooster Group’s sensational A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) at The Performing Garage, their New York base. This latest piece from one of the city’s most iconic presenters of experimental theater is their most stimulating, accessible – I mean this as a strong compliment – works I’ve seen from them in recent years (this is the seventh Wooster Group production I’ve seen, and I can vouch that they’ve varied wildly in terms of success).

A Pink Chair, an ode to the late Polish experimental theater director Tadeusz Kantor, continues the company’s recent obsession with the deconstruction and rigorous replication of past works of art. The B-Side, The Town Hall Affair, and Early Shaker Spirituals have all sought to accomplish essentially the same thing – that is, to capture the very heart and essence of momentous moments of the creation of art, some of them unexpected and unintended, through highly disciplined mimicking.

What makes A Pink Chair, directed and shaped so effectively by Elizabeth LeCompte, so successful is that it operates both as a piece of documentary theater about Kantor (largely through video segments featuring the subject’s daughter), as well as a vivid, very theatrical reenactment of portions from the director’s penultimate production, the prescient I Shall Never Return. This gives the piece context, making the very real ghosts it conjures that more haunting. As with past Wooster Group productions, the level of precision is pretty astonishing; the company remains the gold standard in terms of the meticulousness of its execution.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A PINK CHAIR (IN PLACE OF A FAKE ANTIQUE)
Off-Broadway, Play
The Wooster Group at The Performing Garage
1 hour, 10 minutes (without an intermission)
Through June 2