April 17–25, 2026
Q: How many performance artists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: I don’t know, I left. Somewhere in everyone’s interior Rolodex of live-event memories is a purgatorial experience at the perimeter of some durational performance in which the bodies on display do either nothing gravely for an inordinate amount of time, or something, some procedure or process, at an excruciatingly slow pace. Before such horizons of the unchanging same, who could blame audiences for ducking before the denouement? But early escapes from the frenetic complexity of a Wooster Group production are both unthinkable and impossible. For just over a week at London’s Coronet Theatre, the group staged Nayatt School Redux, a reimagining cum archival re-performance of the original 1978 work Nayatt School that threw spectators into the swirling, polyvocal core of its entropic vortex.
What makes the journey hard to resist is company director Elizabeth LeCompte's careful ramping up of intensity, transitioning from limpid lecture-presentation to chaotic cocktail party hysteria. Nayatt School Redux begins with group members Ari Fliakos, Kate Valk, and Michaela Murphy sitting at a long table up right against the front row. Here Valk, from table center, outlines the restaging impulse. “We have these recordings,” she begins. LeCompte and the group attempted to make a DVD of the performance, realized there wasn’t enough material to provide a complete view of the original work, and so decided to rerun Nayatt School to “fill in the gaps.”
Valk’s physical position and her role as narrator also fills the literal space and metaphysical absence left by former group member and famed monologist Spalding Gray. In the original production he sat where she sat, steering audiences through the selection of texts and materials from which the ensuing action was devised: T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1948), a vinyl recording of the play featuring Alec Guinness, assorted vinyl records of one-act horror dramas, and much more. In the original production, all this material was surveyed and described by the charismatic and archly professorial Gray, to whom it belonged and to which he was personally and autobiographically attached.
This serene mediumistic channeling of Gray is more commentary than autobiography, explaining the logic behind the cast’s superimpositions of historical action throughout the work. Frequently the performers exactly mirror the speech, action, and physical positioning of their historical counterparts playing the same roles on a large screen, positioned onstage amidst the near same arrangement of props in the original video. It is a high-wire, edge-of-the-seat act speaking to the group’s years of pioneering audio-visual work, distinct from the basic doubling seen in much theater and performance today, wherein action “onstage” is projected live to give various fragmented perspectives of the same spectacle (as in director Kip Williams’s 2025/26 maximalist production of Jean Genet’s 1947 play The Maids). It also speaks to the value of the Performing Garage, the group’s permanent space in New York. This kind of virtuosic precision takes rehearsal, rehearsal takes space, and both take money; the complete absence of which precludes most artists in London (working poor, woefully underfunded, priced out of any property) from traveling a similar road.
The layering of speech and an assortment of reference texts often unthinkingly described as “postmodern deconstruction” is here more a procedure of noumenal mining. LeCompte is using the words to get beyond the words; not to some point of indeterminate relativity, but to a destination of truth (an approach in some ways similar to that of former Group Material member and late artist Tim Rollins, and the group K.O.S). Take Eliot’s play, a scene from which forms the frenzied, rigorously choreographed climax of the Wooster Group’s piece. The Cocktail Party’s free verse satire of a kind of mannered Belgravian social scene is performed at such an accelerated pace and pitch that it really gets to the hysteric vacuity of what Noel Coward referred to (in his 1924 portrait of English society decadence and addiction The Vortex) as the “ceaseless din of trying to be amused all the time.”
Such emptiness, though trained on the drawing-room existence of the upper classes, in that theatrical line running from Coward to Eliot (then gloriously subverted by Harold Pinter), is a hallmark of much social interaction across the classic socio-economic categories (working, middle, upper), and arguably the nature of most, if not all, dialogic communication online. But it is through the very unnaturalness of a dramatically stylized upper-class English that the horror vacui propelling our daily babble of compulsive vapidity, hidden by the casualness of quotidian speech, is revealed.
Behind it all is the inevitability of death, and behind this production looms the suicide of Spalding Gray. For in the history of contemporary performance has any single person talked so much? Was this compulsion to speak driven by an effort to affirm presence, to stave off the void? Perhaps a reach too far, but a fertile existential angle of inquiry for audiences nevertheless. It is one among many interpretative lines spun by affective reactions to LeCompte’s compelling direction and the Wooster Group’s kaleidoscopic performance. Nayatt School Redux was by turns elegiac and ecstatic, but always a world away from the knuckle-gnawing solemnity of people doing nothing.
