Elizabeth LeCompte - The Wooster Group

Since its foundation in the seventies, The Wooster Group has developed into one of the most influential theatre companies of the late twentieth century. Today, director Elizabeth LeCompte and her cast of actors have lost none of their power. In each new production they confront the repertoire with a multitude of media: film, video and objects as well as pure body language. The combination of intelligent, radical acting and new media placed in an 'open', evocative setting generates a unique sort of theatre. Tennessee Williams' play is set in the boarding house in New Orleans where he stayed as a young man during the thirties. In the play the young writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening as a tenant of Rue Toulouse, nr. 722. Inhabitants of the house swirl up out of the writer's mind as archetypal Williams characters, longing for release, haunted by thwarted dreams and crippled by intense sensitivity. In its production of the work, The Wooster Group experiments with new modes of expression for Williams' now familiar lyric voice.