Experimental Journey.(Elizabeth LeCompte)(Interview)

It was the top of the eighth on a drizzly night at Yankee Stadium--June 6, 2006. The Red Sox were in town, and Elizabeth LeCompte, wrapped in a thin red parka and settled into a great seat, in the seventh row, just to the right of home plate, was balancing a plastic cup of Courvoisier and a greasy carton of ballpark pizza, and studying Joe Torre, a couple of feet away at the Yankee dugout railing. LeCompte is a director, or, as she is often described, a "creator of theatre." In three weeks' time, her company, the Wooster Group, was scheduled to open in Barcelona with a new "Hamlet" that, by her own admission, was "not quite there" (it starts previews at the Public Theatre on October 9th), and LeCompte was wondering how Torre might handle the problem of a video technician notably unconcerned by a stage-right video monitor that didn't track and a Polonius with a memory block. LeCompte thinks of Joe Torre as a mentor in composure, or, you could say, a colleague in art. "I am not just a baseball fan; I am a Yankees fan and a Torre fan," she says. "I like winners, and the way Torre can keep a team together and make it shine, but he doesn't excuse anything when he loses. He says, 'It was just one of those games--you go back and forth in this business.' I wish I could be that way about a play."

It looked like one of those games that night. There were two men out, and the Yankees held a 2–1 lead, but the redoubtable Manny Ramirez was strolling to the plate, to loud booing from the Yankee bleachers. LeCompte got to her feet and joined them. ("Ramirez is awful! " she says.) She loves booing at the Stadium. She loves the noise and the ads and the video screens and every bit of the music, from the scratchy old Kate Smith recording of "God Bless America" to the "Y.M.C.A." of the grounds crew. She thinks of a night game in the South Bronx as an inspirational mise en scene, perhaps because it is the only spectacle in town that achieves so naturally the elegant, chaotic harmony of the best of her pop-classical, mixed-genre, technologically and textually tangled Wooster Group productions. Consider "House/Lights," from 1998, in which Gertrude Stein's "Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights" meets a sixties lesbian S & M cult flick called "Olga's House of Shame." Or her newest project, "La Didone," in which Francesco Cavalli's seventeenth-century opera travels to the edge of the galaxy by way of another Italian classic called "Planet of the Vampires." She watches the players as if she were scouting actors for a new production. She can spot the style of a West Indian island or a prairie town in the way each Yankee performs; she thinks about how he would do onstage. "Jeter's a great player, but he's too self-conscious," she said, nodding in the direction of the Yankee captain, who was leaning over the dugout fence, pointedly nursing an injured thumb as Ramirez connected on the second pitch and sent the ball soaring toward the left-field stands. "He could never be an actor." But when Melky Cabrera, racing deep into the outfield, leaped into the air for a catch that effectively saved the game, she whispered, "I liked that leap! Maybe I could use it."

Elizabeth LeCompte is a small, slender, fine-boned woman of sixty-three, with dark-green eyes and silvery blond hair that she winds up into a floppy twist at the back of her head, and the slightly startled look of someone whose considerable beauty, not to mention talent, has caught her unaware. People meeting LeCompte for the first time receive that look. It tells them that the famous materfamilias of American experimental theatre is really a timid, fragile sort of person, and of course they want to please her. Her shyness may be her best weapon in the arsenal of what could be called the LeCompte performance. There isn't another director in the country whose demands are so exhaustingly eclectic, or whose disapproval is so direct and steely, or whose enthusiasms are so sudden and so shifting that a few hours of rehearsal can leave her actors reeling with what one described to me as "imagination fatigue." But no one who has ever worked with her regrets the experience, and everyone in the business seems to want to have it.

Actors often talk about "the genius of Elizabeth LeCompte." Scholars of performance art write books and monographs and dissertations about the influence of Derrida or Barthes or Foucault on LeCompte's work, and on the theories of theatre that have led her to deconstruct or dissect a play--to take something familiar, something you know, or think you know, subject it to every conceivable transgression of interpretation and form, and return it to you illuminated and deepened. Luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde--Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter Sellars among them--describe her as first among equals. Susan Sontag sat in the first row at every one of her openings, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is building a theatre for her in his new arts center in New York. In thirty years of directing, she has survived both the storm troopers of political correctness and the reverence attendant on a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar MacArthur "genius" award. (She gave the money to her group.) She says, "I am not an intellectual. I am not trying to mean anything--I'm trying to have a good time."

She works out of a tiny theatre at 33 Wooster Street, in SoHo, called the Performing Garage, where the Wooster Group was born, in the late seventies, and where it still rehearses and, occasionally, performs. Her core company consists of seventeen actors, technicians, and designers, living, as she does, on salaries that average about thirty thousand dollars a year--most notably Kate Valk, a fifty-year-old actress who is one of the group's founding members, and two younger actors, Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos, who are in their thirties. You will also find a couple of "associates" in every LeCompte play. They can be friends pitching in. They can be strangers whose style happens to take LeCompte's fancy. They ...