The Wooster Group never fails to astound. With To You, the Birdie!, their (sub)version of Racine’s Phedre, they don’t fail once again. Gone is the clash of inter-texts, gone the wild dances that break the tension. Here, told with classic concision, is the tragic legend of Phedre, queen to Theseus, cursed by Venus to conceive a fatal attraction to Hippolytos, her stepson: no blackface acts, no western movies, no underwater swimming, just the play. Or rather, with small changes, just the text of the late Paul Schmidt’s colloquial “version.”
Director Elizabeth LeCompte and her set, video, light, costume and especially sound designers have observed the neo-classic aesthetic of decorum through inversion: What was hidden is now exposed. The world of the play has become all body, aerobicized and medicalized. For the setting of the French court, think a badminton court. For the throne, a wheelchair. For the queen’s hidden “illness,” a stage anchored with canes and festooned with enema bags. Decorum is reimposed, in a sense, by a strict geometric economy of video monitors and sliding metal frames.
For all that, the performance belongs to the actors, led by long-time Wooster member Kate Valk. If the U.S. cared enough about the stage to designate its artists “living national treasures,” as in Japan, Valk would head the list. She breaks through the Wooster signature deadpan in moments of harrowing expression: at one moment, a silent tantrum; at another, a lascivious slackening of the jaw; and at the sexual turning point, an abandoned grabbing and grappling while attendants rain her with an anal douche. Shades of Artaud.
This Phedre barely speaks. In keeping with the cool “Windows” environment of the visual score, the text is for the most part recited in flat but brilliant monotone by Scott Shepherd, who also plays Theramenes, Hippolytos’s confidante. The Wooster Group has long played with forms of language-alienation, such as lipsynching, speed-ups and repetition of “phoned-in” text. To You, the Birdie!, in Shepherd’s muted narration, may be the most distanced text so far, yet it paradoxically frees the actors for extreme physicality. This is another switch on the theatre of Racine, ideally performed by stationary actors summoning the entire drama through rhetorical intensity.
To You, the Birdie! was a sold-out succes fou throughout its eight-week Brooklyn run earlier this year. The Wooster Group’s already-assured cult status in New York no doubt received an extra boost from movie stars Frances McDormand, as Phedre’s nurse Oenone, appearing for the first time with the group, and Willem Dafoe, who has performed with the group since its inception, as a Brando-type King Theseus. Dafoe’s double career as commercial icon and committed avant-gardist is itself a subject for postmodern contemplation.
LeCompte discovers twin routes to tragedy in the Racine text: the restriction and degradation of the female body, and the freedom and entitlement of the male. With only a thin apron fluttering across his genitals, Ari Fliakos’s naked young Hippolytos is on full display. Dafoe lounges about half-nude, showing off a glistening torso. Shepherd and Fliakos sit casually bate-balled in a male locker room scene at the beginning of the play. The women, by contrast, are all tied up: Valk offers her bravura performance with mincing sideways steps and elbows strapped behind her back. Oenone drowns herself tied in ropes and weighted by a rock. One may argue with this world of harsh polarities, but one is riveted.
Elinor Fuchs is the author of The Death of Character (Indiana University Press) and a frequent contributor to this magazine.
