ABOUT THE COMPANY

Working at The Performing Garage, Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray created the first Wooster Group pieces, directed by LeCompte, around Gray’s autobiography: Sakonnet Point, an almost wordless evocation of Gray’s childhood through dreamlike images, props, and movement; Rumstick Road, concerning the suicide of Gray’s mother; Nayatt School, which included Gray’s first monologue and scenes from T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party; and Point Judith, which included original text by James Strahs and dialogue from the end of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Collectively known as Three Places in Rhode Island, this trilogy and epilog began touring the United States and Europe, with major support from the Mickery in Amsterdam and Kaaitheater in Brussels. An important long-term collaborative relationship between the Group and filmmaker Ken Kobland began during this period. Late in the decade, Gray further developed his monologues as solo pieces, presenting India & After (America), Sex And Death to the Age 14, and Booze, Cars, and College Girls at The Performing Garage.

In 1980, LeCompte and Gray formally founded The Wooster Group, along with Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith. In 1982, the Group began a series of works which became our second trilogy, The Road to Immortality. The first of these works, Route 1 & 9, juxtaposed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, displayed on video monitors in the style of a TV soap opera, with a simultaneous live rendition of a vaudeville routine by Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham. The second piece in the trilogy, L.S.D. (… Just the High Points…), incorporated readings from 1960s American counterculture with scenes from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which, after a cease and desist letter from the author, were supplanted with text by Michael Kirby. The third part of the trilogy, Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony, drew on Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Lenny Bruce’s standup, and the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician. This work was made in part during the Group’s residency at the Kennedy Center’s American National Theater at the invitation of Peter Sellars (who suggested the Flaubert text). The Group collaborated with writer-director Richard Foreman on two co-productions, Miss Universal Happiness (1985) and Symphony of Rats (1988). Also during this period, the Group made Hula and For The Good Times, two dance pieces, and North Atlantic, a satirical Cold War musical with text by James Strahs, which began as a collaboration with the Globe Theater in The Netherlands.

In 1991, a consortium of European presenters commissioned a series of Wooster Group works: Brace Up!, based on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters as translated by Paul Schmidt; Fish Story, which incorporates Act 4 of Three Sisters into a documentary about theater life in eight dances; and our new conception of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. For performances of our version of another O’Neill play, The Hairy Ape, the Group rehabilitated an abandoned Broadway theater in 1997. The decade ended with House/Lights, in which Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights collides with Joseph Mawra’s B-movie Olga’s House of Shame. These shows were lit by Jennifer Tipton, beginning a long-term collaboration. In 1998, the Group choreographed Dances With T.V. And Mic for Vincent Dunoyer of Rosas. Media pieces from this period include White Homeland Commando for television, and the films Rhyme ‘Em To Death, Today, I Must Sincerely Congratulate You, and Wrong Guys. Elizabeth LeCompte received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Over the course of the decade, the Group’s work was selected for three Whitney Biennials.

In 2002, the Group created To You, The Birdie!, a new adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre which we set on a badminton court. The piece opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the first of many collaborations with St. Ann’s. In 2005, the Group made the site-specific performance Who’s Your Dada?!, a collaboration with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. A new group of European presenters commissioned the Group’s first opera, Cavalli’s La Didone set in outer space, which opened in New York in 2009. Other significant works during this time include: Poor Theater, based on the work of Jerzy Grotowski, Max Ernst and William Forsyth; Erase-E(X), a dance commissioned for Joji Inc; a version of Hamlet which channeled an “Electronovision” film of Richard Burton’s legendary 1964 performance; I Am Jerome Bel (2008), a dance performance created for the Rolex Arts Initiative; and the first performances of Vieux Carré, a late Tennessee Williams play. In 2007, we completed There Is Still Time . . Brother, a 360-degree interactive video installation which toured internationally. Touring of our theater repertory also expanded during this decade, including engagements at Festival d’Automne à Paris and REDCAT in Los Angeles, launching relationships that continued throughout the next decade.

The Group was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to collaborate on the theater design of  Baryshnikov Art Center, which we opened in 2010 with a remount of North Atlantic and returned with Vieux Carré in 2011. The Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned the Group to collaborate on William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, with the RSC playing the Greeks and the Group playing the Trojans. Later, the Group adapted this production into our own piece, Cry, Trojans! The Group collaborated with director Richard Maxwell on Early Plays, based on O’Neill’s Glencairn plays. Kate Valk directed her first piece for the company in 2014 with the record album interpretation Early Shaker Spirituals. In 2015, the Whitney Museum asked the Group to create a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the museum’s new building. In the remainder of the decade, the Group hopscotched between developing and touring several new pieces. The Room, by Harold Pinter, premiered in Los Angeles in 2016. A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique), commissioned by Poland’s Instytut Adama Mickiewicz to honor director Tadeuz Kantor’s centennial, premiered at Bard SummerScape in 2017. Also opening that year was The Town Hall Affair, based on Town Bloody Hall, a Hegedus & Pennebaker documentary about a 1971 debate on women’s liberation. The first performances of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons”, another record album interpretation directed by Valk, took place in 2018.

The Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s learning play The Mother (translated by the company) opened the 2021 Wiener Festwochen. Elizabeth LeCompte was selected as Artist in Focus at the Schaubühne’s 2023 Festival International Neue Dramatik, where the first performances of Nayatt School Redux took place. In New York, the Group performed two new pieces: Get Your Ass In The Water And Swim Like Me, an exploration of the Black American story-telling form Toasts directed by Kate Valk; and Symphony of Rats, a new incarnation of the Group’s 1988 collaboration with Richard Foreman, directed by LeCompte and Valk. In 2025, the Group was invited to perform at the Venice Biennale, where LeCompte received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in theater. The Group’s work continues with two new pieces in development.