The Wooster Group is throwing caution to the esoteric winds with the fascinating 70-minute A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique). The way-way-offbeat presentation is a tribute to Tadeusz Kantor, the groundbreaking Polish director who died in 1990 after establishing an international career.
Yes, as part of a performing background he went international, although he only presented four of his dark Cricot 2 works in New York City—at LaMama, where only the most devoted and sophisticated audiences made it their business to be in attendance. The late LaMama founder Ellen Stewart deserves thanks yet again for having the foresight to bring Kantor to Manhattan, as she did so many others.
In a program note, Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte explains that the Adam Mickiewicz Institute was the impetus for A Pink Chair. (The title is a reference to a stated Kantor memory.) Officials there instigated the project. Taken by the idea but not instantly seeing how she could build on it, LeCompte found her way to Kantor’s daughter Dorota Krakowska.
As a result, LeCompte and company—an outfit much like the outfit with whom Kantor worked throughout his compulsively distinguished career—have improvised a remembrance of the late theater artist’s last play, I Shall Never Return, which is an autobiographical look at his life. In the memory play, the Polish Jew (his father died in Auschwitz) appeared, in part conjuring recollections of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s 1907 The Return of Odysseus.
Typical of Wooster Group productions, A Pink Chair is multi-media. Among the several chairs, tables on casters, panels and accompany whatnots—lighting designers Jennifer Tipton and Ryan Seelig, sound designers Eric Sluyter and Omar Zubair, costume designer Enver Chakartash are credited but no set designer—there is a sizable flat screen upstage on which Krakowska frequently appears to discuss her father. Segments of his videoed I Shall Not Return are shown.
For the most part, the Wooster Group actors replicate the I Shall Not Return action. Zbigniew “Z” Brymek, sometimes with arms taped, sits at one table that rolls hither and thither during the 70 minutes (divided into a prologue and five parts). While he does that with introspective solemnity, nine actors dressed in versions of their onscreen counterparts move as if propelled by a collective case of extreme nerves. Sometimes, they look to be only seconds from complete exhaustion.
The players, all clearly versed in Wooster Group acting standards, are longtime company leading lady Kate Valk, as a figure called The Wratchet Schlump (she mostly cowers in a loose white dress); Ari Fliakos, as a ubiquitous innkeeper and Odysseus; Jim Fletcher, as a priest usually wielding a large, thin cross. Also in the cast are Enver Chakartash, Danusia Trevino, Erin Mullin, Gareth Hobbs, Andrew Mallet, and Suzzy Roche (for the most posing silent as Odysseus’s patient wife Penelope).
Repositioning the chairs and tables (no pink chair on hand, it seems), the actors go through their proscribed motions as—it’s quite likely—the spectators check the troupe’s movements for accuracy against what’s happening onscreen for accuracy. Occasionally, the genial Krakowska, credited as dramaturg, speaks or doesn’t speak but simply holds an appealing satisfied expression. More often than not when the actors recite, their words are forcibly amplified and perhaps otherwise augmented. It’s difficult to tell.
Though the parts of the play—each announced as it commences—are involving, the most affecting perhaps is the last, in which the players enact their version of The Return of Odysseus in partial unison with Kantor’s version.
In the end, the Pink Chair concept combined with the manner in which it’s realized is hypnotic, and that’s despite an intrinsic challenge to understand what’s happening from minute to minute, from second to second. Perhaps the mesmeric effect isn’t despite but because of the challenge to follow LeCompte and ensemble at their hectic activity.
Several songs are worked into the play and when unison singing takes over—particularly the rousing rendition of “Bound for the Promised Land”—the result is uplifting in the spirit of Kantor’s ultimate intention for his work, though he does state at one point, “The artist must always be at the bottom.” Given his history, his persistent grim take on existence can’t be surprising.
As to the word “spirit”: More than once in A Pink Chair, it’s explained that the Polish word for “spirit” is “duch,” the “ch” apparently pronounced as “k.” The intent is patently to underline the production’s spiritual purpose. Nothing better can be said of the Wooster Group’s current offering than that it achieves its inspiriting purpose.
A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) opened on April 28, 2018, at The Wooster Group and runs through June 2. Tickets and information: thewoostergroup.org
