REVIEW: The Wooster Group’s ‘A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique)’

Photo: The Wooster Group presents A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) at NYU Skirball. Featured in the show, from left, Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher, Danusia Trevino, Enver Chakartash and Erin Mullin. Photo courtesy of Steve Gunther / Provided by Helene Davis PR with permission.

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NEW YORK — The Wooster Group, at their heart, are deconstructionists and theatrical pioneers. They take a topic, a subject, a person or a work from the canon and give it the ole spin through the Wooster Group Performing Garage, meaning an ensemble of talented actors pick it apart, play with it and then form their own creation, all with the gentle guiding hand of director Elizabeth LeCompte.

Their latest work is A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique), a quick and oddly transfixing exploration of fellow theatrical auteur Tadeusz Kantor, a Polish director who lived from 1915 to 1990.

The play runs little over an hour and features Kantor’s daughter, Dorota Krakowska, as something of a televised beacon in the night. She is credited as dramaturg and appears in recorded video, which is displayed at the center of the stage. The Wooster Group ensemble members make their way around this focal point, recreating many of Kantor’s common tropes and reenacting his mannequin theatricalism that stressed the hallucinatory nature of everyday objects.

If this all sounds high-minded and painfully intellectual, no worries, because coupled with this microscopic look is bonafide clownish fun. After all, some of Kantor’s theatrical wonderment can be found in the theater of the absurd, in the intricacies of sound and presence, in the minimalism of pacing and pathos. This undoubtedly leads to some humorous sequences.

A PINK CHAIR is broken up into several acts, all of which are announced by one of the performers. The meta-production also features a character fashioned after Kantor himself, and sometimes he sits and becomes a mannequin, watching the effusive creation around him.

The set, besides the central television screen, is industrial chic, with tables and levers at precise and yet seemingly haphazard angles. There’s a real playground feel to the proceedings, as if improvisation — whether now or back in the rehearsal room — is the glue that holds everything together.

The characters are largely nondescript, with a few exceptions, but they still prove memorable because of their DIY costumes that make them look like a ragtag group of traveling actors. Some of them don clown noses, while others seems like extras in a local production of The Wizard of Oz. There’s a priestly figure, which makes sense because Kantor often used the visage of a religious person in his plays. Another actor has makeshift cardboard pieces covering parts of her body.

For those without a stomach for the avant-garde, one could find the evening unfocused or difficult to follow, but for others, especially Wooster devotees, the circumstances of A PINK CHAIR make perfect sense in their circuitous storytelling and non-narrative form. The acts of these actors are both baffling and fascinating, and for this reviewer, that meant these 70 minutes were thrilling, in the same way an abstract painting can leave someone thinking and debating for hours.

Right down the street from where the Wooster Group presented A PINK CHAIR at the NYU Skirball is the historic Judson Memorial Church, a place where artists and dancers would go in the same spirit as the Wooster Group and explore, deconstruct, have fun and eventually let the audience in on the secret. It’s nice to know that the wonders and possibilities of the avant-garde and absurd are still possible in an increasingly sanitized and conforming theatrical scene.

Brava, Wooster, brava!

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The Wooster Group’s A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, recently played the NYU Skirball. Running time: 70 minutes. Click here for more information.