Vintage Wooster

Savran, David. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.

This is a fairly strange exploration of a strange group. Savran attempts to mirror the Wooster Group's style by presenting their material out of chronological order and in fragments of interviews and photos juxtaposed with his analysis. Unfortunately, this organizational structure leaves the book with interesting first and final chapters and an interminable middle chapter.

Savran doesn't explicitly explain his arrangement with the group, but he seems to be some sort of authorized official historian with a great deal of access to the group. This leads me to question also what kind of constraints he might be working under in exchange for this access. He does not explain much about how the group came into existence (other than it vaguely emerged from Elizabeth LeCompte's and others' disillusionment with Richard Schechner's leadership of the Performance Garage) or other personal dynamics within the group. For example, Steve Buschemi magically appears in L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) with no indication of when he joined the group. Elizabeth Lecompte's sexual relationships with Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe clearly influenced the structure of the group, and yet they are barely suggested in Savran's book. Similarly, Ron Vawter's homosexuality goes completely unmentioned. In is attempts to avoid documenting the personal gossip and dirty laundry of the group, Savran leaves gaping holes in his explanations of the group's history.

Route 1 & 9 and L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) emerge from this book as fascinating theatrical experiments masterfully described and analyzed by Savran. The juxtaposition of Our Town and The Crucible respectively with various other cultural moments evoke criticism of both American theatrical traditions and the historical periods represented by each of these plays. Savran explores L.S.D. as an exercise in historiography, looking at Miller's Crucible and the work of Timothy Leary as two images of the same period. The Wooster Group takes apart that moment; "it performs the fact that history, like theare, is always a dance of absence and substitution, a dance of death" (205).

The middle chapter, however, in which Savran discusses all of the early work of the Wooster Group prior to Route 1 & 9, works neither as a history of the group nor as an anaysis of the ideas behind these productions. In this chapter, the pieces that compose the Rhode Island Trilogy (Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School), its epilogue (Point Judith), and a completely unrelated dance piece (Hula), are all thrown together in a jumble of all the Wooster Group's early works. In the discussion, these pieces emerge as a general tribute to Spaulding Gray and the entire early work of the Wooster Group seems to be a sop to his ego. Each piece of this section is discussed mainly in its contribution to Gray's psychological development progressing toward his career as a monologist. His departure from the group seems to happen because "I knew it had to come to an end" (149) as opposed to his self-centered "need to be...the major subject matter and the focal point" (149) or because his relationship with LeCompte had ended. This entire chapter seems tedious quite disingenuous in its failure to discuss the real impetus behind any of these early works.

Savran's most fascinating contribution in this work is his discussion of LeCompte as one of the major American theater artists. He frequently emphasizes what it means that all this work comes from a female perspective and what it means for her to be "autocratic" (eschewing specific reference to the director as auteur that is rather familiar in avant garde theatre). While at one point LeCompte seems to use her role as a female director as an excuse for some misogynist comments by Gray, for the most part Savran celebrates the strength of her control over the Wooster Group as a hint of a feminist critique contributing to the Wooster Group's deconstruction of the social structures by which the group and society are implicated but which they also challenge from within. It's an interesting analysis and it deserves some more time, especially in reference to LeCompte as a woman, which Savran seems to want to explore further. He is clearly a feminist and a socialist, but he tries to avoid bringing too many of his personal beliefs into this discussion of the group's work. He limits his own perspective and contribution to mostly a fairly strict analysis of the performances.