My impulse was to write the last black play ever for myself. I really believed if I put it all into one play, people would leave me alone.
—
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
The Wooster Group by Mark Magill
- Alfred Uhry by Paul Rudd
- Barry Le Va by Saul Ostrow
- Jane Dickson by Sylvère Lotringer
- Jon Lee Anderson by David L. Ulin
- Judy Davis by Liza Béar
- Lydia Davis by Francine Prose
- Peter Greenaway by Lawrence Chua
- Roger Guenveur Smith by Coco Fusco
- David Del Tredici by J. D. Dolan
Interviews
- David Armstrong by Nan Goldin
Artists on Artists
- I Dream I am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar by Agha Shahid Ali
- Already Dead by Denis Johnson
- A Man of Small Volume by Gabriella De Ferrari
- Resentment: A Comedy by Gary Indiana
- Four Poems by Gigi Marks
- Jeanne Dunning by Mimi Thompson
- Spirits of Manhattan by Kathleen White
- Domain by Marcia Lyons
- La Zona Roja by Mark Jude Poirier
- Decor #1: Bavaria by Mark Robbins
- Two Stories by Roberta Allen
- On The Tallest Hill In Rome by Roberto Juarez
- Black Maps by Sharon Horvarth
- In Bosnia by Steven Henry Madoff
First Proof
- Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark by Peter Strauss
- Daniel Harris’s The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture by Gary Indiana
- Reverend Ethan Acres by David Pagel
- Tina Barney by Marvin Heiferman
- Peter Boynton by Saul Ostrow
- Jim Butler by Shirley Kaneda
- The Wooster Group by Mark Magill
- Subjectivity: Ween, Michael Kroll, and the Dandy Warhols by Lynn Geller
- Royal Trux by Tod Wizon
- Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector by Jenifer Berman
- Deborah Eisenberg’s The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg by Thomas Bolt
- Klaus Kertess’s South Brooklyn Casket Company by Betsy Sussler
- Colm Tóibín’s The Story of Night by Patrick McGrath
- William H. Gass’s Finding a Form by Guy Gallo
- Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood by Betsy Sussler
Editor's Choice
Willem Dafoe in The Wooster Group’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. Photo by Mary Gearhart. Courtesy of The Wooster Group.
It is a strange fact of nature that the most violent forms of weather—hurricanes and tornadoes—have at their heart a calm, still center. That center is only evident because of the contrasting fury that surrounds it. Otherwise, it’s just another pleasant, sunny day.
The Wooster Group has been subjecting the texts of modern theater to their own form of heavy weather for the past 20 years. In meteorology, at least, the eye transforms the landscape by its passage. This still center appears time and again at the heart of The Wooster Group’s work, wreaking an equal sort of transformation. It is currently revealed in the storm of language that makes up Eugene O’Neill’s “comedy of ancient and modern life” (O’Neill’s words) The Hairy Ape—the Group’s latest effort and their first in what the city’s banners proclaim as “The New Times Square.”
Directed by the Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte, with a mad, startling performance centered on Willem Dafoe’s Yank—a benighted stoker feeding coal to flame the iron bowels of a luxury liner—the play charts Yank’s course from the stoke-hole to a bleak and battered enlightenment. Yank searches for his place and purpose under a steady rain of blows that drive him to his ironic end in the crushing embrace of an ape. Hardly an ode to Darwin, The Wooster Group nonetheless continues, with this grimly comic Ape, to subject contemporary theater to their own irresistible laws of evolution.
—Mark Magill
Related
“I worked at Shepherd-Pratt mental hospital, and I liked to take my name tag off and maybe be confused for one of the patients.”
The actors chat about performing masculinity, transitioning, and Blackwell’s one-person show They, Themself and Schmerm.
“I asked my students for the image of the essence of tenderness. One girl brought in a small, silver plate with a bunch of grapes neatly laid out on it. When I noticed she had stripped the skin off the grapes, I got goose bumps.”
Originally published in
BOMB 60,
Summer 1997
Featuring interviews with Barry Le Va, Jane Dickson, John Lee Anderson, Lydia Davis, Judy Davis, Peter Greenaway, Roger Guenveur Smith, David Del Tredici, Alfred Uhry, and David Armstrong.
