Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. Living Theater, October 2007: Photo: chantel cherisse lucier

In referencing Richard Burton’s Broadway performance of Hamlet as the impetus for her own version of the play, the Wooster Group’s director Elizabeth LeCompte states, “Channeling the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, we descend into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of another ” (LeCompte, Quoted in the performance program, 2007). Indeed, Burton’s Hamlet is the very basis for LeCompte’s production, as a recorded live performance of it is projected onto an upstage screen while the Wooster Group’s company of nine actors replicate what is being shown. Positioned on a relatively bare stage with a single raised platform to the left, LeCompte’s troupe simultaneously mimics the staging, physical gestures, and vocal renderings of Burton’s company.  By design they deny themselves an individualistic interpretation of their given role(s) - many of the performers play multiple parts - thereby forcing themselves to resist the text’s rich poetry, expressive emotionality, occasional humor, and uncanny imagination, and instead they mechanically match what is being portrayed onscreen.  LeCompte’s self-described function is that of an “archeologist” attempting to construct a “temple” from the artifacts of a past performance (LeCompte, quoted in the performance program, 2007). Though her concept may sound rather intriguing, especially insofar as it pertains to theatre as a memory machine of sorts, the effect of the Wooster Group’s experiment is both dull and disengaging. 

Similarly to LeCompte’s endeavor to replicate Burton’s Hamlet, Judith Malina’s revival of The Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces offers another example of an attempt to copy a past production and re-present it for contemporary audiences.  Produced during the company’s self-imposed exile, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces first appeared in Paris in 1964, was performed in exchange for free rehearsal space (For more on the Living Theatre’s work while in exile, see Saul Gottlieb, “The Living Theatre in Exile: ‘Mysteries, Frankenstein,’” Tulane Drama Review (Summer, 1966): 137-152), and was created from theatre games and sound-and-movement exercises for actors. The piece is performed without an intermission and consists of nine disparate episodes that echo the theatrical theories and practices of Grotowski, Chaiken, and Artaud.  In the latter case, for instance, Artaud’s privileging of theatrical ritual arrived at through dance, physical gesture, and music rather than relying on a textual narrative, is evident throughout the performance, and perhaps most particularly demonstrated by the eighth episode in which the ensemble - a group that for the most part was not even born when Mysteries premiered - attempts to shock us out of a conventional spectator’s role by engaging in primal screams, while nonsensically shouting, gasping, salivating, and crawling throughout the space and into the audience.  The idea is to enable a transformational ritualistic experience for all, which of course is very much in the spirit of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.  However, if the Parisian Mysteries and its numerous productions of the 1960s, including a post-exile run in New York City (1968), was indeed a unique experiment that coincided with its contemporaneous historical moment, the recent revival occurs as a museum piece that is somehow lost in the past.  Although one can readily connect its anti-war stance of the 1960s with the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and moreover, locate the insidiousness of American capitalism and imperialism therein, the precise revival of this forty-year-old piece, unfortunately, occurs more as an artifact of theatre history than a catalyst for political change.     

Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. Living Theater, October 2007: Photo: chantel cherisse lucier

Both the Living Theatre and Wooster Group’s “reproductions” exemplify a postmodern use of theatrical “ghosting” that evokes the memories of past performances within a current context.  In his work The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson, in point of fact, specifically cites the Wooster Group in identifying how experimental troupes often use theatrical archives - be they textual, directorial, or performative - as a way to depart from the more illusory and text-centered aesthetic akin to the realistic and romantic dramas of the nineteenth and early-to-middle-twentieth centuries: “The Wooster Group may in a certain sense be said to have returned to a traditional practice of many theatres, East and West, before the advent of the particularized stages of romanticism and realism, in relying upon a stock of settings, properties, and costumes that are regularly reused in different production contexts” (Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004: 171).

Carlson accurately notes that the Wooster Group has built its reputation on recycling past works into a postmodern context, just as they recently did with Burton’s Hamlet.  In doing so, they use Brechtian theory and practice by foregrounding the performances (the cinematic mimicry provides a fresh understanding of Brechtian gestus), emotionally alienating the spectator, and promoting intellectual criticism. From the images of Burton’s version, as well as other Hamlets that are interstitially inserted from time to time (e.g., Branagh, Olivier, Ethan Hawke), LeCompte continually reminds us that we are viewing a performance that is closely associated with a remembered performance, thereby showcasing theatrical memory, not Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the subject of interest.  The result is a heady experiment at the expense of the nuance, drama, and theatricality of what is arguably the best-known play in Western society.  Although one might admire LeCompte’s deconstructionist endeavor from a conceptual standpoint, the fact remains that the audience is left without anything to connect to, except the rather simple notion that theatre is an ephemeral art which cannot be recreated—a point made quite obvious by her ensemble’s game, if unsuccessful attempt to replicate Burton’s production.  Unlike a well-orchestrated Brechtian play, the Wooster Group’s Hamlet fails to entertain us on any level; it is dull, humorless, and given to an unsophisticated theoretical premise that is redundantly communicated over three relentless hours.  LeCompte’s idea would perhaps be better expressed as a thought experiment mediated through an academic article. 

If the Wooster Group’s experiment is a cerebral one, as I indicated earlier in referencing Artaud, the Living Theatre’s endeavor is strictly ritualistic.  In attempting to arouse the spectator’s passions against war and imperialism, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces functions as a visceral form of political theatre.  Perhaps this is best identified by the fourth episode in which a makeshift “Happening” is created. With Judith Malina sitting cross-legged center stage (Malina’s late husband Julian Beck filled this role in the original Mysteries) and a lit candle before her, the company (young and old) forms a circle around her by interlocking their arms and beginning to lightly hum in unison. Members of the audience join them in this collective séance (I must confess I chose not to participate and have regretted it ever since), as political interjections such as “Stop the War!” and “End Hunger!” is blurted out. The humming eventually crescendos then slowly descends to a deafening silence, before members of the audience return to their seats and a blackout precedes the troupe’s next episodic offering.    

The aforementioned segment of Mysteries proved to be the most effective insofar as it viscerally and emotionally engaged the audience - even if not participating in the séance circle one could not mistake the moment’s poignancy - while drawing critical attention to a very topical event(s), which in a current context could be applied to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the famine, disease, and poverty plaguing many of the nations of the Third World.  However, the rest of this revival consisted of a collection of disassociated theatre games and acting exercises that did little to invoke relevant socio/cultural issues, but rather, drew attention onto Mystery’s place in theatre history.  While they were occasionally amusing, especially episodes six’s demonstration of various tableau vivant in rectangular boxes, a physically dexterous feat exhibited by the entire ensemble, the piece’s greater majority of segments served as little more than a recycled reminder of a work and an organization whose time has passed.  Like the Wooster Group’s dry attempt to replicate Richard Burton’s Hamlet, their precise revival of Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, though occasionally entertaining, hardly could be classified as cutting edge experimental performance, thereby contradicting the company’s illustrious place in the history of the theatrical avant-garde. 

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)