Directing
A video reconstruction of the 1977 Wooster Group production Rumstick Road, an experimental theater performance created by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte after the suicide of Gray's mother. Archival recordings are combined with photographs, slides, and other materials to recreate the original production.
Adapted from a novella by James Strahs (the author of “Queer and Alone”, as well as the Wooster Group’s play, “North Atlantic”), this unfinished 1997 film from the Wooster Group was first shown as part of the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Aside from a screening as part of Anthology’s tribute to the Group in 2012, it has rarely been seen since. A tale of smuggling and survivalists that adopts the tone and visual style of film noir, but with a narrative logic all its own, it stars Willem Dafoe as Jack Straw, a small-time operator who ran a “pharmaceutical outfit” before an accident changed everything. A rare instance of an extended moving-image work by the Wooster Group that was created independently of their theatrical productions, WRONG GUYS is a fascinating and little-seen work. — Anthology Film Archives
The Wooster Group's production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, translated by Paul Schmidt and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, with performances from Kate Valk, Peyton Smith, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos, Anna Kohler, Beatrice Roth, Ron Vawter, and Willem Dafoe. This presentation of the 2003 production of BRACE UP!, designed by Ken Kobland and LeCompte, incorporates close-up recordings of the performers simultaneously with continuous wide-angle footage.
White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.
Rhyme 'Em To Death reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame from a new perspective, that of a minor character - the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches.
In The Wooster Group’s HAMLET, Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is re-imagined by mixing and repurposing Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud. The Burton production was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown as a special event for only two days in nearly 1,000 movie houses across the U.S. The idea of bringing a live theater experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called “Theatrofilm,” made possible through “the miracle of Electronovision.” The Wooster Group attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film. We channel the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, descending into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of another.
Drawing from Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his letters, travel journals, and biography, this video layers fantasy, sexual obsession, morbidity, Romanticism, and boredom alongside the ghostliness of empty hotel rooms, aural atmosphere, and an homage to surrealist and horror films.
The OBIE-winning collision of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights with Joseph Mawra's B-movie classic, Olga's House of Shame.
The Wooster Group's Obie-winning production of Racine's Phedre
