On The Ground: New York

by Debra Singer

(excerpted)

Even the more established theater groups this year warranted consideration in the art-world context, however. Stylishly distilled in its uses of appropriation, simulation, fracturing, and repetition—all strategies deeply familiar to art audiences today—was the Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet with troupe member Scott Shepherd as the lead. Based on the movie version of the Shakespearean play’s 1964 Broadway production, in which Richard Burton played the lead, the Wooster remake brings together live performers onstage and a manipulated “ghost” of the film, which is projected onto the screen behind them. Throughout the show, performers echo aspects of the film, replicating stance, staging, tone, and gesture. The palimpset of past and present, sound and image, makes it a Hamlet experience like no other, in that the production isn’t aboutHamlet at all, but rather about the fleeting uniqueness of live performance and the dominance of our media culture today: The stinging truth of our TiVo times is that greater comfort seems to lie in the distanced repetition of what we already know.

It must be said here that Shepherd, with his astonishing charisma and effortless stamina, seems to have single-handedly turned acting into the latest incarnation of virtuosic endurance art. He also starred in the Brooklyn-based ensemble Elevator Repair Service’s production of Gatz, a six-and-a-half-hour tour de force involving (in part) a reading by Shepherd of “The Great Gatsby” from cover to cover. Due to conflicts with the F. Scott Fitzgerald estate, the production has yet to appear officially in New York, but this year it has traveled around the world (including Philadelphia) to unanimous acclaim. A direct offspring of the Wooster Group in many respects, but with its own distinctive generational qualities, Elevator Repair Service draws inspiration from multiple sources, creating productions as an ensemble, like Radiohole, that are inspired by odd combinations of found texts mixed with unusual choreography, low-tech props, imaginative sound tracks, and a wicked dose of whip-smart humor. In Gatz, Shepherd’s character arrives one morning at his shabby, rundown office, where he finds an old copy of the famous novel amid the clutter on his desk and starts to read aloud from it—and then doesn’t stop. Each word of Fitzgerald’s is preserved but also transformed as Shepherd’s coworkers go about their business, ignoring his behavior, until odd coincidences between the book’s plot and the actions onstage start to surface. The results are mesmerizing, being true to the text in a verbatim way but transforming the classic novel—by shifting the context around the reading—into something strange and bewildering even within its own conjured dramatic world.