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While Arthur Miller has been rewriting the book of Genesis for
the Jewish Rep and dusting off Death of a Salesman for
Broadway, Elizabeth LeCompte has been busy reinventing The
Crucible for our time. The 50-minute version LeCompte and
the Wooster Group are presenting at the Performing Garage
under the title LSD (Part One) has nothing to do with
the Miller classic usually associated with high school drama
departments, always hungry for plays with lots of roles for
little girls, or with somber Lincoln Center-type revivals that
plod along laboriously registering every correspondence
between the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy hearings. No,
as the title suggests, this is more like The Crucible
on acid: half the time you can't believe what you're seeing.
The principals sit at microphones on a long, somehow sinister
steel-gray table. Ron Vawter plays the witch-hunting Reverend
Hale as a splenetic prosecuting attorney who exchanges
double-time gobbledygook with court official Danforth, played
by Matthew Hansell, an urchinn who's 15 and looks 10. Spalding
Dray's Reverend Parris with his underwater goggles and Eraserhead
haircut looks exactly like the sort of preacher who wuld hide
in the bushes for years on the chance that ne day he might spy
some naked girls dancing. And Kate Valk triumphantly
impersonates the play's two maidservants in her notorious Aunt
Jemima blackface from Route 1 & 9, hilarious and
terrifying as the holy-rolling Tituba and bugging her eyes out
to Jim Clayburgh's weird, woozy sound effects as Mary Warren
trying to faint on demand. Just as the Wooster Group found the
essences of The Cocktail Party, Long Day's Journey Into
Night, and Our Town in surrealistic deconstructions
of those plays, their Crucible doesn't just represent
the hysteria that Miller's play dramatizes but reproduces it
among the actors and audience, in keeping with the fierce
visions -- hallucinations? -- of LeCompte, whose company is
one of the last experimental theaters in New York.
LeCompte's Crucible, like the larger three-part piece LSD
it belongs to, is about hearings and visions, and typically
the work is a dialectic between aesthetics and politics. A
stage director trained in painting and photography, LeCompte
manipulates material as much for how it sounds and how it
looks as for what it means, which gives her productions layers
of irony. In Route 1 & 9 she used vivaciously
mindless blackface routines from vaudeville as a doubled-edged
device to both mock and ennoble Our Town's sentiments
about mortality. And it was significant that the blackface was
performed live, the play on video in soap opera close-ups:
each element was a critique of its opposite, equally strong
and equally true.
Similarly, with The Crucible LeCompte lets the surface
play itself while she picks out details she likes. her
approach takes off from two lines in the play, "The Devil
is precise" and "The world has gone daft with this
madness." Her precise madness has actors chiming in
chorus-style on lines that assume the lurid ring of New
York Post headlines, and (ever fond of onstage
pandemonium) she loves it when the girls go wild. "When I
read the stage direction 'The girls scream,' I got the
giggles," LeCompte confided after a rehearsal at the
Garage last week. "Omigod, a playwright has given me
permission for the girls to scream -- everything is all right
in the world!" The themes of peRsecution aND paranoia
that figure in The Crucible are felt throughout LSD
(Part One) even though much of the dialogue is purposely
garbled -- the savagely cartoonish acting speaks volumes about
the frenzy of flying accusations. And what most interests
LeCompte is between the lines anyway: the idea that American
society is terrified of people with strong visions about
anything from God to politics to art.
Her interest, of course, is intensely personal. The Wooster
Group's use of blackface in Route 1 & 9 raised
charges of racism that resulted in a loss of state funding for
the always-struggling company, and LeCompte understandably
felt that her whole way of working as an artist was
threatened. "When we did Route 1 & 9, all the
questions came up about the artist's responsibility for
meaning, the artist's responsibility for social issues, which
is what brought me to The Crucible," she said.
"When Miller wrote The Crucible, he knew who he
was talking about, he knew what the metaphors meant, he knew
who was good and who was bad -- he actually knew that! Even
now, I can't say what the political intent behind Route 1
& 9 is or whether it was racist, and my inability to
say anything about that is disturbing. So I went back to The
Crucible to get into his head, to see how he could do
that, and then try to reproduce as clearly as I could its
intellectual as well as emotional center."
But if LeCompte looked to The Crucible for moral
clarity, she finds in it the same anarchy and chaos that runs
through the Wooster Group's work. She finds it perversely
consoling the believe the Devil is in Massachusetts,
notes with interest that only women are said to have seen him,
and clearly sides with him against logic, theology, and
sex-negativity and in favor of anything (like, in rare
instances, theater) that uses dangerous fun to exert
mysterious powers over people. "This production has to do
with visions, with seeing things other people can't see. it
has to do with stepping outside of normal ways of producing
imagery, it has to do with conjuring. For instance, people
talked about how tin Route 1 & 9 we conjured racism
in the room instead of representing the forces of racism and
another force of good against racism. That's the way we work
-- sometimes we become the thing in order to expiate it, to
show it. I trust in my conjuring. I go by instinct. I'm still
in touch with what gives me pleasure and pain, and when i feel
pleasure and pain I hold onto them and put them together, and
I count on something more coming from that."
Eventually,LeCompte plans to collage The Crucible with
a film by Ken Kobland based on an album called Timothy
Leary, Ph.D. LSD and with excerpts from the debates
between Leary and G. Gordon Liddy (to be played by Spalding
gray and Ron Vawter). Meanwhile the Wooster Group is
rehearsing another new piece called North Atlantic, an
obscure take-off on South Pacific written by Jim Strahs,
who wrote the Rig section of the group's Point
Judith and the novel Wrong Guys, adapted to the
stage by Mabou Mines. if all goes well, the complete LSD
and North Atlantic will begin playing in rep in
February. The only hitch is that, unlike the other playwrights
whose works LeCompte has discombobulated in the past, Arthur
Miller is very much alive and takes a keen interest in what is
done with his work. Until he gives permission to use his
words, LSD can't officially open for reviews.
The playwright came to one performance and was apparently
impressed if a little shocked -- he thought they were asking
for permission to quote some sections of the play, but since
they're basically doing the whole play he felt he couldn't
give his approval. What the Wooster Group is really asking
for, though, are the rights to do the play as if they were
mounting a summer-stock production or a musical adaptation. So
negotiations are still in progress, and there's always a
chance that Miller will decide it would hurt his chances of
getting a "first-class" production of The
Crucible at (God forbid) Circle in the Square. Of course,
such a Grand Old Man should feel honored to be embraced by the
avant-garde in his own lifetime and to see his work performed
without the musty reverence that usually shrouds classics, in
one of the few theaters in New York where something new and
exciting is actually happening.
Village Voice, December 13, 1983
Note: Miller subsequently denied the Wooster Group rights to
perform The Crucible. The final work, L.S.D.
(...Just the High Points...), used a new text created by
Michael Kirby to replace Miller's.
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