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The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams' Vieux

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The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams' Vieux THE WOOSTER GROUP’S VERSION OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ VIEUX CARRÉ DECEMBER 1 – 4, 2010 | 8:30 PM DECEMBER 5, 2010 | 7:00 PM DECEMBER 7 – 11, 2010 | 8:30 PM DECEMBER 12, 2010 | 7:00 PM presented by REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater California Institute of the Arts THE WOOSTER GROUP’S VERSION OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ VIEUX CARRÉ With Ari Fliakos, Daniel Jackson, Daniel Pettrow, Kaneza Schaal, Andrew Schneider, Scott Shepherd, and Kate Valk Director: Elizabeth LeCompte Associate Director: Kate Valk Lighting: Jennifer Tipton Sound: Matt Schloss, Omar Zubair Video: Andrew Schneider Production Manager: Bozkurt Karasu Stage Manager: Teresa Hartmann Technical Director, Additional Video: Aron Deyo Master Electrician: Kent Barrett Technical Assistant: Daniel Jackson Wardrobe: Enver Chakartash Sound Consultant: Jamie McElhinney Special Advisor: Casey Spooner Cineturg: Dennis Dermody Producer: Cynthia Hedstrom General Manager: Edward McKeaney Grants/Operations Manager: Jamie Poskin Archivist: Clay Hapaz Media Projects: Geoff Abbas Arts Education Manager: Kaneza Schaal Administrator: Jason Gray Platt Strategic Consultant: Joel Bassin Video Blog: Zbigniew Bzymek Special thanks to Ellen Mills, Rob Reese, Raimonda Skeryte, and Judson Williams. Thanks to Yesim Ak, Ruud van den Akker (set pieces), Diego Cortez, Dr. Kenneth Holditch, Alessandro Magania, John Oglevee, Jack Warren, Ben Williams, and the staff, residents, and families of St. Anna’s Residence, New Orleans. Cast (in order of appearance) The Writer Ari Fliakos Photographer Daniel Pettrow Mrs. Wire Kate Valk Nursie Kaneza Schaal Jane Sparks Kate Valk Nightingale Scott Shepherd The Pickup Daniel Jackson Mary Maude Alan Boyd Kleiman (on video) and Miss Carrie Tye McCool Scott Shepherd Avatar Andrew Schneider Sky Daniel Pettrow VIEUX CARRÉ runs approximately two hours with no intermission Co-commissioned by Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Festival d’Automne and Centre Pompidou. The performances at REDCAT are funded in part with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the “Leading for the Future Initiative,” a program of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. THE WOOSTER GROUP’S VERSION OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ VIEUX CARRÉ is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. on behalf of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi on March 26, 1911. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 where he lived at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for Vieux Carré. His works include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly, Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others. Williams died on February 25, 1983 in a hotel in New York City. Excerpt from an introduction by Robert Bray in the second printing of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré by A New Directions Paperbook Recent scholarship has challenged conventional notions about the play’s evolution. Because Vieux Carré was not produced until 1977, traditional thinking placed it as a late organic fulfillment of his short story, “The Angel in the Alcove” (1943). Moreover, since Vieux Carré falls into William’s category of “memory plays,” and because we are drawn to the Writer’s apparent sense of nostalgia, it has seemed logical to assume that the author penned the play from the temporal distance of several years, if not decades. However, an examination of working manuscripts demonstrates that Williams relied less on memory than was previously suspected. In a paper presented at the 1999 Tennessee Williams Scholars’ Conference in New Orleans, Williams specialist Linda Dorff exploded conventional notions about the play’s evolution by tracing the working script back to January of 1939 – the actual time that Williams lived at 722 Rue Toulouse. True to most of the playwright’s work, the drama metastasized over several years and through various phases and titles, including Dead Planet. The Moon! (working title in 1939), I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sunday (written during the 1960s), and Broken Glass in the Morning, or Skylight (a version also from the 1960s written expressly for Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman but never performed by them). Williams said that he turned his full attention back to Vieux Carré in 1973 while on an ocean cruise. Working through radically different drafts over the next few years, he prepared a Broadway version in 1977. Although the play was a crashing failure and closed after only five performances,Daily News critic Douglas Watt wrote that “we must cheer this late new flowering of the author’s genius.” Tennessee Williams’ Production Notes for The Glass Menagerie: A Play by Tennessee Williams, Random House, New York (1945) Being a “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention. Because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture. THE WOOSTER GROUP The Wooster Group is an ensemble of experimental theater artists now in its 36th year. Situated in the worlds of dance, visual, media, and theater arts, the Group’s work is part of radical post- modern experiments that originated in the mid-seventies. In the Group’s pioneering productions, texts and technology are interwoven to tell stories in new ways. Director Elizabeth LeCompte, in collaboration with the company’s performers and technical artists, has made more than 30 works for theater, dance, film, and video, including RUMSTICK ROAD (1977), L.S.D. (…JUST THE HIGH POINTS…) (1984), BRACE UP! (1991), HOUSE/LIGHTS (1999), TO YOU, THE BIRDIE! (Phèdre) (2002), WHO’S YOUR DADA?! (2006), HAMLET (2007), THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER (2007), and the opera LA DIDONE (2008). The Group has toured in the U.S. and to Europe, Russia, Canada, South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street in New York City is the company’s permanent home. It owns and operates the Garage as a shareholder in the Grand Street Artists Co-op, established as part of the Fluxus art movement in the 1960s. The Group also performs in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and as the resident theater company at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. Company - Geoff Abbas, Kent Barrett, Aron Deyo, Ari Fliakos, Clay Hapaz, Teresa Hartmann, Cynthia Hedstrom, Daniel Jackson, Bozkurt Karasu, Elizabeth LeCompte, Edward McKeaney, Jason Gray Platt, Jamie Poskin, Matt Schloss, Andrew Schneider, Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk Associates (Current Projects) – Zbigniew Bzymek, Enver Chakartash, Dennis Dermody, Alan Boyd Kleiman, Ken Kobland, Juliet Lashinsky, Jamie McElhinney, Daniel Pettrow, Kaneza Schaal, Casey Spooner, Jennifer Tipton, Ariana Truman, Omar Zubair Founding and Original Members – Elizabeth LeCompte, Spalding Gray (1941 – 2004), Ron Vawter (1948 – 1994), Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, Peyton Smith The Wooster Group gratefully acknowledges support from the following public and private organizations: Anonymous Was A Woman, Edward T. Cone Foundation, EmcArts’ Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts, a program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Distracted Globe Foundation, Kate Valk & The Wooster Group are participants in the Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowships, funded by the William & Eva Fox Foundation and administered by Theatre Communications Group, Lucille Lortel Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New York Theater Program, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, “Leading for the Future Initiative,” a program of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Open Society Foundations, Fund for the City of New York, The Tony Randall Theatrical Fund, James E. Robison Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, Theatre Communications Group’s New Generations Program, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lila Acheson Wallace Theater Fund, as well as the generous contributions of many individuals. THE WOOSTER GROUP CHRONOLOGY THEATER VIEUX CARRÉ · 2010 HAMLET · 2007 WHO’S YOUR DADA?! · 2006 POOR THEATER · 2004 TO YOU, THE BIRDIE! (Phèdre) · 2002 HOUSE/LIGHTS ·1999/2005 THE HAIRY APE · 1995 FISH STORY · 1994 THE EMPEROR JONES · 1993/2006 BRACE UP! · 1991/2003 NORTH ATLANTIC · 1984/1999/2010 THE ROAD TO IMMORTALITY FRANK DELL’S THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTONY · 1987 L.S.D. (…JUST THE HIGH POINTS…) · 1984 ROUTE 1 & 9 · 1981/1987 THREE PLACES IN RHODE ISLAND POINT JUDITH (an epilog) · 1979 NAYATT SCHOOL · 1978 RUMSTICK ROAD · 1977 SAKONNET POINT · 1975 OPERA LA DIDONE · 2008 DANCE I AM JEROME BEL (excerpted) · 2008 ERASE–E(X) · 2004 (with Joji Inc.) DANCES WITH T.V.
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