FINDASHOW

THEATERREVIEWACaseForCubismAndDealsWithDevils
ByBENBRANTLEY
Published: February 3, 1999, Wednesday
Gertrude Stein was right, after all. So it would seem, in any case, from the testimony
provided in the bedazzling new theater piece from the Wooster Group, ''House/Lights.''
This multimedia collage, inspired by Stein's opera libretto of 1938, ''Dr. Faustus Lights
the Lights,'' makes nothing less than a case for Cubism, which Stein famously advocated
as a patron of painters and practiced as a writer, as the dominant sensibility of this
century. It's the perfect show to see in 1999, finding in the prophecies of artists of
decades ago the disjunctive present in which we now live.
Hold the groans, please, and the dismissive rolling of the eyes. While the intellectual ambitions of
''House/Lights,'' now in an open-ended run at the Performing Garage in SoHo, may be arrogantly grand, there
is nothing dry or academic in the experience of the show. As a mind-scrambling entertainment, there's nothing
else like it around; it turns disorientation into a primary sensual pleasure, even as it raises terrifying thoughts
about the deeply mixed blessings of technological progress.
Through the use of the latest tools of that technology, the Wooster Group has assembled a portrait, both
fractured and fluid, of a world in which any set sense of chronology, culture or identity can no longer be taken
for granted.
That's the Faustian bargain that Stein deals with, in her typically elliptical way, in her original text, in which
the Faust figure is the inventor of artificial light, altering forever the natural order of time. Under the incisive,
spectacularly resourceful direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, that text acquires at least another 60 years' worth of
levels of displacement.
Live performance is juxtaposed with what emerges from an assortment of television screens that record,
splinter and transform what is happening onstage until you're no longer sure which image has the greatest
reality. Voices, too, are mechanically distorted and fragmented. What is the source of what you're hearing?
(Since this sort of aural confusion is now an unwanted commonplace in overmiked Broadway musicals, it is
especially gratifying to find the Wooster Group making sardonic use of the same phenomenon.) Stein wrote
that movies would change forever the very way we look at things. Ms. LeCompte makes it clear that this was
just the beginning. Jim Findlay's metal grid of a set features, in addition to phalanxes of video screens and
assorted electric bulbs (the uncanny lighting is by Jennifer Tipton), a laptop computer at center stage. And in
the evening's master of ceremonies, the magnificent Kate Valk, we have a creature of astonishing artificiality, a
tin-voiced 1930's-style beauty with marcelled hair and bee-stung lips who might be a digitally manufactured
composite of movie stars. She's the ultimate screen siren, happiest in two dimensions.
There is something unnervingly languorous about Ms. Valk's presence, even as she adjusts microphones, angles
herself for yet another small-screen close-up and goes through some frenetically choreographed pantomimes.
She suggests a centuries-old vampire prostitute, tired of turning tricks but still amazingly proficient at doing so.
She may not look like Faustus, the role the program says she is playing, but she is clearly someone (or is it
something?) who has sold her soul, or lost it, a long time ago.
It is to Ms. Valk that the principal duties of reading Stein's text fall, including narrative, song lyrics and stage
directions. (In reading ''Dr. Faustus,'' it's not always clear which of these elements is which.) Her rushed,
mechanical, Betty Boop-ish voice, swathed in synthesizer-induced reverberations, oddly matches the neutrality
that Stein aimed for in her cadenced, repetitious prose. (Quick sample: ''You fool you devil how can you know,
you can you tell me so, if I am the only who can know what I know then no devil can tell me so. . . .'')
Ms. Valk is clearly the (oops, I was about to say soul) center of the evening, but it is impossible, as in all Wooster
Group productions, to disassociate her from the other performers. Here they include Suzzy Roche, looking like
someone who never left the Electric Circus, as a snaggle-toothed Mephistopheles; gray-haired Roy Faudree as
the Boy who visits Faustus and Ari Fliakos as Faustus's dog, who says nothing but ''thank you'' in a raspy, hung-
over-sounding voice. Both Tanya Selvaratnam and Helen Eve Pickett play the Marguerite figure, who is given
two separate names in Stein's text.
This fission of character is typical of the evening. In addition to telling the story of Faust according to Stein,
''House/Lights'' weaves in the plot of ''Olga's House of Shame,'' a 1964 cult film by Joseph Mawra. It's like a
seedier, more sinister version of a Roger Corman movie, with buxom and studly jewel thieves inflicting all
manner of sexual torture upon one another. (It also involves the initiation of a young woman into this ring of
sadism, so there is a Faustian parallel of sorts.)
The live ensemble acts out the scenes from the movie that are concurrently being shown on the video screens.
Sometimes the simulcast images from the stage bleed into those of the film; at other moments, snippets of
other movies, from Busby Berkeley spectacles to Mel Brooks's ''Young Frankenstein.'' (The video collages are
Broadway/OffBroadway OR Readers'HighestRated
THEATERREVIEW MOREONTHISSHOW
SearchAllNYTimes.com
Theater
WORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYLE TRAVEL JOBS REALESTATE AUTOS
ART&DESIGN BOOKS DANCE MOVIES MUSIC TELEVISION THEATER Broadway Off&OffOffBroadway Plays Musicals SpecialOffers VIDEOGAMES
PRINT
SAVE
HOMEPAGE TODAY'SPAPER VIDEO MOSTPOPULAR TIMESTOPICS Help smush988
other movies, from Busby Berkeley spectacles to Mel Brooks's ''Young Frankenstein.'' (The video collages are
the astonishing work of Philip Bussmann.)
You'll have to trust me when I say that there is nothing random-feeling about this mixture of elements, which
also feature danced segments that seem choreographed by a tornado but are actually the work of Trisha Brown
and Ms. Pickett. (The music is by Hans Peter Kuhn.) The performers and the technical team, which includes
the sound designers James (J .J.) Johnson and John Collins and the costume designer Elizabeth Jenyon, work
as if they had all been generated by the same computer program. Everything in ''House/ Lights'' seems to
ricochet and echo off everything else.
It also never loses sight of the idea of the increasing uncertainty of identity in the modern age, a theme that
fascinated Stein, especially after she achieved worldwide fame with ''The Autobiograpy of Alice B. Toklas.'' The
ways in which ''House/Lights'' carries out the confusion of flesh and technology, of self and the projected
image, are often breathtaking.
One thinks, particularly, of Ms. Valk running a finger across her lips, while at the same time the mouth turns
red on the black-and-white image of her face on the screens. There is also the moment when the physical
gyrations of Ms. Valk and Mr. Faudree, acting out a sex scene from ''Olga's House of Shame,'' are caught (and
utterly desexualized) in the overamplified sounds of cloth rubbing against cloth.
There is a splendid sequence in which Ms. Valk prepares a serpent for its big scene in the Faust play. The
serpent is a microphone wearing a mask, with the voice of a boozed-out, aging stand-up comic (provided by Mr.
Collins). Though the evening, which runs about 90 minutes, is intermissionless, it does adhere to Stein's given
structure of five acts. The divisions are signaled by the image of a red curtain falling on each of the video
screens.
In the past, the Wooster Group has mostly used its deconstructive tools on familiar classics, like O'Neill's ''Hairy
Ape'' and ''Emperor Jones'' and Chekhov's ''Three Sisters.'' Frankly, the idea of this troupe's taking on Stein
seemed to promise an evening of the obscure leading the obscure. This simply isn't the case.
Stein's reputation, of course, has never been universally solid. There are still many who regard her as the
ultimate intellectual fraud. ''A cold, black suet pudding,'' was how Wyndham Lewis described her writing. ''All
fat, without nerve.''
Similarly, accusations of arty, posturing pretentiousness have habitually dogged the Wooster Group. In asking
us to listen anew to Stein, to something other than ''rose is a rose is a rose,'' this company illuminates what
remains enduringly relevant in Stein's voice while confirming the troupe itself as part of an intellectual
continuum that began in the age of Picasso. The world that ''House/ Lights'' portrays may be in atomistic
shards, but there's a strangely comforting wholeness in this century-enfolding symmetry.
HOUSE/LIGHTS
A work by the Wooster Group based on Gertrude Stein's ''Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.'' Directed by
Elizabeth LeCompte; sound by James (J. J.) Johnson and John Collins; sets by Jim Findlay; video, Philip
Bussmann; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; costumes by Elizabeth Jenyon; music by Hans Peter Kuhn; assistant to
the director/stage manager, Clay Hapaz. Presented by the Wooster Group. At 33 Wooster Street, SoHo.
WITH: Kate Valk (Faustus/Elaine), Suzzy Roche (Mephistopheles/Olga), Roy Faudree (Boy/Nick), Ari Fliakos
(Dog/Johnny), Tanya Selvaratnam (Christine/Nadja), Helen Eve Pickett (Susie/Ellie), Sheena See (Holly/
Jenny) and John Collins (Mr. Viper).
Home World U.S. N.Y./Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs RealEstate Autos SiteMap
2012TheNewYorkTimesCompany Privacy YourAdChoices TermsofService TermsofSale Corrections RSS Help ContactUs WorkforUs Advertise